Gifts of the Blood God
by nicq98
Summary: Amid the mud and ruins of a distant planet, an Imperial Guardsman witnesses horrors that shatter her faith and set her on the path to heresy.
1. Chapter 1

Note: The following is a fan-created work. Warhammer 40,000 belongs to Games Workshop, which deserves credit for making the most badass universe in fiction.

I. Praise the Four

Private Mrita Konvalos sat down, exhausted, atop a pile of heretic corpses. Rain hissed on the still-hot barrel of her lasgun.

"Now is not the time to rest, Konvalos!" her sergeant shouted. "On your feet!"

Mrita thought she had earned a break—of the couple dozen heretics lying dead in this trench, she'd killed eight—but there was no arguing with the NCO. She stood, and checked the power pack on her weapon. "Where to now, ma'am?"

"The hill by Samson's Crossing." The sergeant, Merce Hetz, marched ahead, and the whole of Third Squad trudged through the muck after her. Six of them remained, in tattered and filthy Cadian-pattern armor, their bayonets dripping blood. "They've got a couple of Hydras up there, keep shooting down our air support. But our platoon needs to regroup first."

The battlefield was a morass crisscrossed by trenches, where war simmered but did not blaze. Little moved around them—just a few knots of wary Pirean troopers like her, prodding the dead with bayonets, and, further out, rumblings and small firefights where the enemy still resisted. As promised, black-painted and spike-adorned Hydras spat flak atop a hill in the distance. Judging by the shell blasts launching brown-grey plumes around them—Pirean regiments were known for their artillery—those positions probably wouldn't survive long enough for Third Squad to make any difference.

So Mrita marched forward, slowly but warily.

"How many more of these you think we'll have to clear out?" asked a soldier beside her. Her name was Enthilde, another private, stocky and black-haired where Mrita was a thin redhead.

"Couldn't tell you."

These trenches had been a bastion of heresy on this world, their denizens now put to rout in the Emperor's name. To secure that victory, the Eighth Pireans had struggled for a week and died en masse, only prevailing in the last few days' frenzy of violence.

"Think His angels will show up and save us the trouble?"

"Maybe, but there are only so many Astartes—wait a minute." Mrita held up her hand. She'd noticed a deep shell crater beside the trench, perfect for an ambush. "Cover me, I'm going to check that out." She climbed over the rim and angled the barrel of her lasgun against any heretics who might lie in wait.

There was only half of one, it turned out. The damage looked to her like a chainsword cut—ragged but much neater than dismemberment by shell—and had probably been inflicted by the regimental commissar, Vant, who'd spent the battle charging into the thick of things, seemingly immune to bullets. Entrails were scattered everywhere and stank like sin.

The heretic was unnaturally pale, all of them were, and he had the eight-pointed star carved into his forehead. A similar star was cast in brass and affixed crudely behind his head like a perverse halo.

"Ugly bastard, huh?" Enthilde said, coming up to look over Mrita's shoulder.

"Extra dedicated, too. Look at these parchments." Mrita bent low, tugged at a few bloodsoaked scraps of paper hanging from the heretic's robes. The rain was already washing out rows of disorganized, sloppy text that could not possibly have been Low Gothic. "Might've been a witch before our commissar cut him in half."

_Fear the witch_, the priests back home had always said, _and suffer it not to live_. In the Emperor's galaxy, the worshipers of false gods got what they deserved.

Even though it was unclear exactly what they worshiped.

"What are you two looking at?" called Sergeant Hetz. "We have a schedule to keep, guardsmen!"

Mrita turned from the body. "Just checking our surroundings, ma'am. The Emperor rewards vigilance."

"He also rewards punctuality, so—"

A torturously high-pitched screech came from… somewhere. Mrita and Enthilde covered their ears, as did the sergeant and her other soldiers, as did the muddy figures of Second Squad fifty paces away.

"What in the Emperor's name?" Hetz shouted, nearly inaudible.

Mrita winced as the sound grew louder, a shriek of agony clawing at her senses. Buried beneath it was a whole chorus of voices speaking gibberish. For moments the torment continued, until the scream cut out and the voices diminished to a mere whisper that made her hair stand on end.

"Lieutenant Gorivan, Commissar Vant, did any of you hear that?" Hetz tapped the comm-bead in her ear. "Shit. I can't raise anyone."

Mrita glanced over at Second Squad, only to find that they had vanished. Beyond a few meters' distance there was not a living soul on the battlefield. She blinked, disbelieving, scanning the ruined terrain for any sign of her allies…

Even the nearby Chimeras had stopped in their tracks.

"Emperor protect us," said Enthilde, behind her. "He should be dead."

"What?" Mrita turned and saw for herself. In the mud at the bottom of the shell crater, the heretic witch had begun to stir, pulling himself up with his thin, tattooed arms.

"Chaos comes," he whispered. "Sorcery and decay, ecstasy and wrath—glorious screaming madness, like you pathetic souls have never seen."

Something squelched not far away. Down in the trench was another cultist back from the dead, standing upright even though her chest was a burnt and bloody hole.

"Praise the Four..." the heretic said. Corporal Maukan decapitated her with a lasbolt, and she still stood.

"Death to the False Emperor!" shouted a body half-buried under a crushed Munitorum crate.

"You fools serve a _corpse_!"

There were others, Mrita didn't know how many, mutilated cadavers springing to life from the trenches and the corpse-piles and the endless fields of muck. By her feet, a severed arm pulled its way towards her.

The witch was doing this. Somehow. Mrita jumped into the crater and stabbed him with her bayonet, repeatedly, as if he were another sack of flour on the training field. He cackled even as the blade pierced his lungs.

"Do whatever you like!" he said, spitting blood. "Your efforts only feed the true gods!"

Mrita thrust the bayonet through the back of his mouth, which shut him up. He gurgled and clawed at her rifle with long, grimy fingernails.

"Praise the Four!" the dead went on. They were everywhere now, in the trench and the wasteland around it, seemingly immune to the cracking lasbolts Enthilde and the others put out.

"Death to the Corpse Emperor!"

The impaled witch still thrashed about, his bare fingernails scratching furrows in the side of Mrita's lasgun. That shouldn't have been possible.

"Praise the Four!"

"Praise Chaos!"

A dozen voices spoke, inside Mrita's head: **Praise the Four.**

She shrieked. Her muscles spasmed, no longer under her control, and half-seen visions assailed her, specters of blood and fiendish desire and crystal cities where the sky was a riotous maelstrom of colors…

The witch stopped moving. Mrita returned to reality. She withdrew her bayonet, panting, then stabbed him again, and again. When she looked up she saw that the heretics had all collapsed back into the mud.

"Third Squad," Hetz said. For a moment she gazed absently past Mrita, then refocused. "Third Squad, I need a headcount. Have we lost anyone?"

Mrita crouched in the blood-spattered shell crater, Enthilde sat dazed at its rim, Maukan, Hetz, Guthro, and Aelim were knee-deep in mud down in the trench. They had everybody.

"No casualties, ma'am," Maukan reported, though that was overstating it.

Around them, clusters of other soldiers pressed forward on the mopping-up operation, seemingly undisturbed, and Mrita could not for the life of her tell where they'd gone.

"Warp-sorcery," Enthilde said. She put her rifle in the crook of her arm and made the sign of the Aquila.

"Foulest sorcery," Hetz replied. "The Emperor protects."

This was the Warp, yes. Mrita had heard it. Something vast and powerful had bled into this world, twisting reality to suit its whims, hiding an army and resurrecting the dead to chant blasphemous praises.

She remembered another name. The Ruinous Powers, a former squadmate had called it, during the Tyranid invasions back home. To her knowledge the man had later been dismissed, maybe shot. But, he had known and feared what he'd spoken of, as had many of the soldiers huddling around the fire on that bleak, overcast night.

The Ruinous Powers.

The Warp.

Chaos.


	2. Chapter 2

As they prepared for their next offensive against the heretics, the bulk of the Eighth Pireans regrouped at Consik City and quartered in an old manufactorum complex, where the walls were pockmarked with bolter holes and a sagging roof contained the overpowering odor of mold. They were broken down into companies, further into platoons and squads, each unit having laid out its cots and lasguns and field packs in a designated territory on the production floor. From time to time Mrita saw the Eighth's enginseers wandering between, prodding sadly at machines that hadn't operated since this planet's uprising three years before.

During a rest period she sat with Enthilde against an old hydraulic press. They had their rifles on a mat in front of them, in varying states of disassembly, and were carefully scraping the mud and grime off each individual piece. Mrita's still bore the witch's claw marks along the side, streaks millimeters deep ending in coils of excised metal.

"So I've been asking around," Enthilde spoke up, breaking a good ten minutes of silence.

"Discreetly?" Mrita asked.

"Of course."

There was no out-and-out rule against discussing the Ruinous Powers, per se, only because they didn't officially exist. Heretics worshiped false gods and that was that. But the Imperial Creed, despite all the answers it claimed to have, couldn't or wouldn't explain what she'd seen in that shell crater, so Mrita looked elsewhere.

"I take it you found something, or you wouldn't have brought this up."

"I talked to Anna. She says there's a guy who knows what we're dealing with. A Mordian."

Anna was their friend in the artillery company, though her main profession was contraband. The 12th Valhallans, another all-women regiment encamped down the road, made particularly good beers in their fuel-tank breweries, and the 117th Mordians, the Pireans' neighbors in this sprawling manufactorum, represented a lucrative market. Shipping and distribution were Anna's job.

"I'm sure she has a price," Mrita said.

"We continue to look the other way. Maybe carry a few kegs for her, in a pinch."

"I'll take it. Who's the guy?"

The guy, as it turned out, was a gnarled old sergeant with an underbite and an augmetic eye. Somehow he'd survived many decades in the Emperor's service, a good deal longer than the fifteen hours a typical guardsman could expect.

Mrita and Enthilde met him in a derelict corner of the manufactorum, where Mechanicus savants used to splice together servitors, and most of the other delinquents who hung around here weren't the type to eavesdrop.

"So you're curious, I hear," the old man said. "Curious is a dangerous thing to be."

He wore Mordian garb: a bright blue tunic trimmed with crimson, a brass Aquila pinned to his chest, a peaked cap bearing the number of his regiment—altogether flashy and useless.

"We just want an explanation for the things we've seen," Mrita said.

"Very well. I've deployed to fourteen planets in my day, and I've seen things, too." He shook their hands. "My name's Adek, at your service."

"Mrita."

"Enthilde."

"Tell me what you saw."

Mrita relayed the story, stone-faced, remembering all too clearly the sound of those voices speaking inside her head…

"You encountered a psyker."

"Yes," Mrita said. "A witch. They round those people up back home."

"They round them up everywhere. Feed them to Him on Terra, they say, or something like that."

"How do they… well… how do these people get their powers?"

"A psyker's power is not his own. He's more of a conduit, drawing energy from somewhere else."

Mrita pursed her lips. "From the Warp, you mean."

"Correct."

She'd traveled through the Warp just once, during the flight here, and she'd spent the entirety of that trip deep within some transport's cargo hold, safe except for the occasional bad dream. But she'd never forgotten that just outside the hull was a maelstrom of unknown peril, where the Emperor's light was but a faint glimmer amid swirling madness and damnation.

"The Warp is more than you think it is," Adek went on. "It's not just a parallel realm for us to fly ships through—it is a place governed by emotions, not physics, and it has its own pantheon, full of gods and demons."

"Is that what the heretics worship?" Enthilde asked.

Adek nodded, the wrinkled corner of his mouth lifting in a trace smirk. "The very same. Four deities, each with his own domain and his own followers."

"Praise the Four," the Warp had told her, directly as well as through the tongues of the dead. Mrita shivered.

"Tell me about these gods," she said, more quietly than before. Even those faint words seemed to echo off the rafters and chains hanging in the shadows overhead.

"There is only one god you need concern yourself with, guardsman." Adek spoke in the tone of an Ecclesiarch or a commissar, handing down the Emperor's judgment from on high, but a wry smile betrayed him. "Very well. You wish to know what the enemy believes, all the better to defeat them. I'll tell you."

He leaned in, and Mrita and Enthilde did the same. This meeting had become downright conspiratorial, now, and if the likes of Commissar Vant ever found out, their fates were sealed. So they might as well continue.

"What the heretics believe is that their gods are the embodiments of human emotions. Pride and desire feed the Prince of Pleasure. Knowledge is the domain of the Changer of Ways, while hope and perseverance feed the Plague-Lord. Wrath, then, strengthens the Blood God, the Lord of Skulls, who sits atop the bones of all those slain in battle."

These were the strange names of strange gods, for whom people she couldn't understand launched their blasphemous crusades. The world Mrita knew grew smaller and smaller.

"But what do these gods give their followers?" Enthilde asked. "The Emperor protects. How can these Warp creatures offer anything greater?"

Adek chuckled. The scars and wrinkles on his face twisted and gave the impression of a maze.

"Shopping for gods, are we?" he said. "Comparing divinities like produce at a market stall?"

Enthilde shot him a glare, and thumped the faded Aquila painted across the breastplate of her armor. "My faith in the Emperor is pure. I merely wonder why anybody would abandon Him."

"Men sell their souls to Chaos because it promises untold power, and, for the most zealous of them, it often delivers."

Chaos had given that witch the power to raise the dead, himself included. Mrita couldn't say she'd ever seen anything comparable from the Emperor.

Maybe He, supposedly "ascended," was just as the heretics said, a corpse on the Golden Throne, and so there was no such thing as a kind, loving god who watched over His subjects. All that left room for, then, were the Ruinous Powers. Madness and darkness.

"Such is the universe?" Mrita said, running her fingers over the scratches on her rifle. A sharp edge pricked her and drew a little bit of blood.

"Such is the universe, according to heretics. I relay only what I have learned of their ideas, during my long campaigns against them, and you two are free to decide the truth for yourselves."

"So you're not telling us what to believe." Enthilde narrowed her eyes, as if she'd encountered some particularly vulgar piece of graffiti scrawled on the side of a Leman Russ.

"It's a small mind that delegates that decision to others."

Chaos wouldn't care what you thought, necessarily. It cared that you served it, fed its power, but unlike the Emperor, it didn't demand endless devotion and unrewarded sacrifice. Mrita supposed it was a mercenary relationship, then, as opposed to the self-abasing worship of the Imperial Cult. The Chaos Gods were insane traders who accepted payment in depravity and mayhem and living souls.

"All right," she said. "I'll believe that the Warp spawned these dark gods and sent them against the Imperium. Can they be defeated?"

"No."

Mrita blinked. "No?"

"None of us will win this war, not with all the lasguns and chainswords the manufactorums will ever put out. You see, Mrita, every thought and feeling in a living soul feeds the Ruinous Powers, forms their very substance, and they have no shortage of food, not with so many trillions of people living all across the galaxy. That is why they cannot be defeated—they are a reflection of our own selves."

This was heresy. A capital offense, like the rest of this conversation, because the foundation of the Imperium's struggle lay in its own confidence in the ultimate victory, and if the Emperor could not win, why fight in His name?

Mrita and Enthilde exchanged glances, saying nothing. They could turn Adek in, of course, but then it would inevitably come out that they had gone around asking about Chaos, and they'd be punished just as severely as the Mordian.

"Thank you for sharing this, Adek," Mrita said. "We've... gotten what we came for."

While Enthilde stared silently at Adek, her fists clenched, some mixture of hatred and confusion writ upon her face, Mrita grabbed her by the arm and led her away.

"I appreciate our little talk," the sergeant called out behind them. "And..."

Mrita turned. "And, what?"

He showed the same wry smile as before. "And, faithful guardsmen, walk in the Emperor's light."


	3. Chapter 3

That night, Mrita dreamt of war. Mostly her foes were Tyranids, a scuttling screaming mass just like the host she'd faced during the invasion of Pirea, but there were also humans among them, skinny, pale, tattooed heretics who fought beside the aliens as if Chaos and xenos had somehow joined forces. The alliance did not save them. She killed droves, a dozen with every swing of her axe, caring only that everything standing in front of her suffered a swift and violent death.

It was power, and it felt wonderful.

Sometimes during the dream she would grow to three or four times her normal size, larger even than an Astartes, and she would throw down her axe in favor of tearing xenos limb from limb with her bare hands. Their sundered claws made great bludgeons, and were even better for skewering heretics two at a time. Blood collected in pools by her feet. An angry red sun hung over the battlefield, and screams were music in her ears.

A klaxon woke her, after a while. There was a servitor rolling down the manufactorum floor, between long rows of cots, blaring crescendos of sound from a loudspeaker installed where its mouth had been.

"Everyone up!" shouted Lieutenant Gorivan. As she passed the sleeping soldiers of Second Platoon she kicked anyone who wasn't quite springing into action. "Grab your gear! This isn't a drill and you _will_ be fighting!"

"Throne…" mumbled the woman beside Mrita, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

"Fucking heretics," said someone else. "Couldn't give us another hour of rest."

Sergeant Hetz was already up, gathering Third Squad, and Enthilde was scrambling into a suit of flak armor. Mrita found her own equipment piled by a defunct cogitator unit. Nobody had stolen any of her power packs, which was nice.

"What's going on?" she asked, jogging up to her unit, her backpack dangling over her shoulder.

"Surprise attack," Corporal Maukan said. She hadn't gotten around to tying her hair up, and tangled black locks half-buried her face.

"Where?"

"All over the damn planet," Hetz said. "General uprising, looks like."

Mrita heard noises echoing down the tall dark halls of the manufactorum. Shouts and las-fire. Explosions.

"Come on, we're moving out!" Hetz told the squad. She led them after the rest of the platoon, a press of flak armor charging beneath dusty Gothic arches.

"You ready, Mrita?" Enthilde said, falling into place next to her.

"Of course." She breathed quickly. The pace was fast, and she was burdened with nearly all her armor and gear, including the lasgun she held tightly across her chest. "The heretics won't know what hit them."

There was a gunfight going on outside the manufactorum, that much was obvious. Quite possibly the heretics were already in the building. Mrita saw a cluster of blue-garbed Mordians firing through a window, but her unit turned the next corner before she even got a glimpse of the enemy.

"Second Platoon, with me!" Lieutenant Gorivan shouted. They were in one of the antechambers, now, which had been built to wow visitors with giltwork and statuary rather than serve any productive purpose. "Our orders are to relieve the vanguard troops! We're dealing with unarmored cultists at close range, so put your weapons on full auto!"

"We'll be on the firing line in a few moments, taking the left flank!" Sergeant Hetz called out to her squad specifically. She led them off to the side as their platoon neared the yawning manufactorum doors and began to disperse. "Aelim, Maukan, get your grenade launchers ready!"

Then the Pireans passed through the doorway, into the night, towards the battle raging on the east side of the complex. Electric lamps gave way to an orange glow from countless ongoing blazes. Administratum offices and hab blocks burned from every window, except where they had collapsed entirely. All that remained of this world's proud history were chipped stone arches and fragments of stained glass.

Some of the larger rubble lay piled up as a crude barricade just past the doorway, and behind it nearly a hundred Imperial Guard soldiers battled against a charging heretic throng. They were a motley combination of Pireans and Mordians, bodies hastily thrown into the fire, their only support a handful of heavy weapons squads and now Second Platoon coming up to reinforce them.

Past the barricade Mrita saw pale, scrabbling, wild-eyed figures, like the ones she'd slain in the trenches outside the city. About half of them were armed. Among them, too, were seemingly ordinary people—day laborers, robed Administratum clerks, even techpriests—whom the touch of Chaos had not visibly corrupted.

"Taking aim!" Maukan shouted, once there was a clear line of fire. She popped off three grenades, which landed in the densest cluster of traitors and sent fragments of gore flying.

"That's how it's _done_, guardsmen! Follow her example!" That was the commissar, Vant, conspicuous in a greatcoat and crimson sash, charging out into the fray with her chainsword whirring. She climbed to the top of a rubble pile and hacked to death several heretics who were attempting to scale it.

Mrita, for her part, found a firing position behind a burnt-out groundcar. She had a clear view down a narrow east-west street. Enthilde took cover to her left, and to her right was a bloodied Mordian private, who looked like he'd been fighting all day even though the attack couldn't have started more than five minutes ago.

"Thank the Emperor," he breathed, before rising to a half-stand and firing a few barely aimed lasgun shots. "We were almost swamped out here."

"We're still almost swamped." Mrita fixed her bayonet, then aimed over the top of the car. Just one shot took down a fat cultist wielding a laspistol, and next she killed another man, altered visibly by Chaos, whose face had narrowed like a serpent's.

Something had compelled these people to rise up. There were so many of them, they had to have been recruited en masse from the population.

A heretic sprayed lasbolts over their heads, pinning Mrita, Enthilde, and the Mordian behind cover. She aimed her bayonet upwards against anyone who might clamber over the top of the car.

"Do they have any armor? Artillery?" Mrita asked.

"No, just these lunatics." The Mordian tried to fire, only to be rewarded with a lasbolt that scorched one of his epaulettes. He fell grimacing and clutching his shoulder. "Fuck. _Bastards_."

Mrita took out a knife, cut a length of fabric from a dead man's tunic, and wrapped it around the wound.

"Thanks," he said. He got to his feet again and sprayed a few more shots against the horde, before ducking to avoid another volley. "Didn't think the city had this many cultists, they must have brought some by train from—hold on a sec."

He raised a hand to his ear and listened to something. The Mordian regiments, always meticulously equipped, had commbeads available for every infantryman, while the Pireans had to shout at each other like idiots.

"Oh, no. Throne, no."

"What is it?"

They were both standing, now, taking potshots at a heretic mob that, thinned out at the hands of two or three Imperial platoons, was finally beginning to stall. Enthilde crouched by Mrita's feet and tried to replace a spent power pack.

"We just got word that unknown ships have appeared in orbit. Apparently this isn't just a planetary uprising anymore."

Hetz shouted, just a short distance down the firing line, and blissfully unaware: "Keep it up! We're turning the tide!"

Beyond the barricade the heretics had withdrawn from their attack and found cover in the burning ruins. There were still plenty of them, though, and they were putting out just as much las-fire as the Guard.

Something rumbled overhead, like artillery in the sky, and when Mrita looked up she watched two plummeting spacecraft break through the clouds, trailing fire. Scarcely an instant later the first came down in the street just twenty meters ahead, the second crashed somewhere in the manufactorum behind her. Landing jets kicked up clouds of plaster and pulverized stone. The ground bucked beneath her feet.

She recognized the craft from a poster she'd once seen—this was an Astartes drop pod, shaped like an angular, blood-red teardrop. Runes and skulls and eight-pointed stars showed that it didn't belong to His sons.

Mrita swallowed. "Here they are."

"Emperor protect us," Enthilde said, standing. Perhaps she was saying that out of habit, or perhaps the conversation with Adek hadn't affected her much, because to Mrita it was looking less and less likely that the Emperor could protect anybody at all.

Six sides of the pod unfolded like flower petals and dropped to the shattered street. From within, a great bellowing emerged, voices human and otherwise accompanied by the pounding of bolter fire, and scarcely had the doors lowered before Mrita glimpsed three titanic armored figures charging out with preternatural speed.

A bolter shell caught her Mordian friend between the eyes, disintegrating his head faster than he could have possibly registered it. Fragments of skull and probably shrapnel stung Mrita's cheek. She fell to the ground, her ears ringing, and watched the corpse slump beside her.

"Reinforcements on the east entrance!" Lieutenant Gorivan tried to vox. She could barely hear her. "We need fucking reinforcements, we've got heretic Astartes—"

A traitor Space Marine leapt over the barricade and cut the lieutenant in half with a chainsword. On the second swing he struck down another guardsman, on the third swing two more, and Mrita could only stare, transfixed by that sheer, brutal efficiency of killing. The marine was a god of war in crimson armor. Horns rose from his helmet, skulls were impaled on spikes atop his pauldrons.

Insofar as anything could be discerned from his incoherent screams, it was this: "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"

Mrita raised her weapon and fired. As expected, the lasbolts barely left scorchmarks on his armor, but she wasn't the only person shooting; in his one-man charge the Chaos Space Marine had landed himself exactly in the middle of the Imperial position. The Mordians were already letting out precise volleys and Commissar Vant had opened up with her bolt pistol.

"You will stand your ground, guardsmen!" shouted the commissar. "There is no retreat in the Emperor's service!"

More heretic bolter shells landed along the barricade, followed closely by the heretics themselves, who fired point-blank into the fray and lashed out with roaring chainaxes. There were only two more Space Marines, surrounded by the smaller, warp-corrupted human cultists who had landed with them. And with these new arrivals from the stars, the local heretics seemed to be emboldened, enough for ragged bands to charge out from the buildings where they'd taken refuge.

"Our suffering has purpose!" shouted the commissar, again, beheading two cultists with one hand and firing her bolter with the other. "Die for the Emperor, and His Imperium!"

The Mordians and Pireans didn't have a hope of maintaining this position. They would be slaughtered, and Mrita sneered at the thought—she couldn't just die here, in a slum on some no-account planet, thrown into a battle she wasn't expected to survive. It had been one thing when she'd fought the Tyranids on her homeworld. Back then, she'd had every reason to risk her life, defending her family and culture against the ravening xenos.

Now, the only reason Vant gave was an empty appeal to a corpse god. Mrita deserved better than that. She'd show them—she would make it through this battle alive and strong, triumphant, not slavishly sacrificed for the Emperor and His Imperium.

She charged at the nearest Space Marine, the first to have scaled the barricade. He was losing his strength, now, his armor crumbling beneath las-volleys and bolter shells and even a lucky Melta shot, scored by a heavy-weapons team that was now so many scattered entrails. She could spot several places where the ceramite was gone entirely. She had an opening, and could kill him.

"Cover me, Enthilde!" she called out over her shoulder. "I'm going in!"

"What the—" Enthilde started, but Mrita was already closing the distance, screaming like one of the demons of myth, channeling all her fear and hatred into motion.

Even without armor the Astartes would have weighed several times as much as she did. He'd dropped his bolter a little while ago, but he still had a chainsword, spinning in a blur of teeth and sundered flesh as he carved through another guardsman. The holes blasted through his armor looked distressingly small, now that she could get a good look at them.

Yet there was no going back. While the marine was still distracted with other foes, she plunged her bayonet through the smoking crater in his chestplate, and fired a las burst at point-blank range.

Red light pulsed. There was the chemical reek of burning insulation, then the smell of flesh, too, as she felt the bayonet finally slide through the last layer of his suit into something more yielding. Blade and las-fire worked in combination, hot metallic vapor spilled out and felt invigorating on her bare face. She let out a cry for the dark power she knew was watching:

"Blood for the Blood God!"

The Space Marine turned, snapping her bayonet in the wound. He looked down at her for a long moment—had he heard her? Was he confused?—then raised his whirling chainsword and prepared to swing.

He did not get the chance to kill her. Enthilde charged into the fray, her hair tangled and her green armor spattered with blood, shouting the Emperor's praises. Most of her shots bounced harmlessly off ceramite. A few landed in the breach Mrita had widened, and made the Astartes howl.

He slashed at Enthilde. The chainsword hit, but only barely, carving open her shoulder plate and sending the poor woman crumpling to the ground, screeching.

"Back here!" Mrita shouted, firing now at the joint under the Astartes' arm. He abandoned his attack against Enthilde and swung the blade against her instead. She was proud to see that he'd gotten clumsy, between his injuries and damaged armor, and she was able to dodge the blow.

"A GOOD FIGHT, AT LAST!" the Space Marine roared. "YOU ARE BRAVE, HUMAN, BUT I WILL SLAUGHTER YOU LIKE A BEAST!"

He stumbled, his wounds overtaking him. Then, the front of his chestplate exploded in gore and shrapnel—Commissar Vant was close behind Mrita, and had put two bolter shells through the hole in his suit. The Marine lunged forward uselessly, and collapsed with enough force to crack the pavement.

That was one Astartes, down.

"Good work, guardsman!" Vant said, patting her on the shoulder. "Get your friend, and let's move! We cannot survive here."

This, from the zealot who'd screamed "No retreat!" just a couple minutes before. Cowardice and hypocrisy. But Mrita looked at the battle, and saw that the commissar had a point: most of the cultists were dead, but there were still two heretic Astartes carving through everything in sight, and some number more who had landed inside the manufactorum with the other drop pod. The Imperial Guard was terribly thin on the ground and liable to be flanked at any moment.

While Vant ran off to rally the other survivors, Mrita crouched to pick up Enthilde.

"You're in bad shape," she said, not bothering to lie. Enthilde's left arm was nearly ripped off, and with another few centimeters' depth it would have been gone entirely,

"Throne, it fucking hurts." She grimaced and cried out when Mrita lifted her to her feet, but there was nothing for it.

"With me, guardsmen!" the commissar shouted, pointing the way with her chainsword. "We have our Chimeras inbound! Prepare to withdraw!"

Something exploded nearby, probably a bolter shell, forcing Mrita to drop to the ground. Enthilde landed on her arm and shrieked. The shot seemed to have come from behind them, towards the manufactorum, and she turned to see a commotion in the towering doorway, where a ragged band of Pireans put up a fighting retreat. They were beset by at least three Astartes and a squirming throng of—cultists, she thought. Perhaps something worse. It was hard to tell in the smoke and darkness and confusion. These things whirled with blades and claws and killed almost as efficiently as the Space Marines. Their frenzied chants echoed through the air and blended with those of the heretics outside: demands of blood for the Blood God, of skulls for the Skull Throne, mixed in with praises for all Chaos.

"Don't listen to them! Keep your faith pure!" Vant said. She had turned towards the door and was firing bolter rounds over the heads of the retreating soldiers.

"No. Listen to our call!" came the response, a bestial growl, ambient rather than anchored to any one person. Mrita shuddered and remembered her encounter with the Warp-witch. "Hear us! Embrace us, as we sacrifice you to the true gods! We bring _freedom_, for those strong enough to follow!"

They weren't just talking to Mrita—around her, guardsmen uselessly covered their ears, or spoke desperate prayers to the Emperor. One woman turned her lasgun around and pulled the trigger rather than face any more of it.

After the horror, new sounds appeared: the roar of promethium engines, the clatter of treads over rubble, the pounding of autocannons. As promised, the Chimeras had arrived. Four rolled up in a line and lurched to rest by the remnants of the barricade. Their weapons blazed, kicking up tufts of debris where they didn't hit flesh or armor, and even the Astartes had to find cover now that they faced real firepower.

Commissar Vant shouted orders:

"Load up, guardsmen! Twelve per vehicle, stragglers will be left behind!"

"Grab that man! He still lives!"

"You! Hellgun team! Hit that window!"

With one arm propping up Enthilde—she was bleeding a truly vast amount, not a good sign—and the other taking poorly aimed potshots at any heretics out in the open, Mrita staggered towards the last Chimera in line. There she passed her wounded friend into the arms of a Mordian medic, and took a seat nearby.

Vant was the last one in before the ramp closed. Her cap had fallen loose at some point during the battle, leaving dense blonde hair to sprawl in no particular direction, and her chainsword dripped blood onto the metal deck.

"We're leaving, dammit!" she voxed, taking the seat across from Mrita. "All vehicles, move out!"

Not two seconds after she gave the order, a rocket or something hit the Chimera ahead of them. Mrita couldn't see it, but the fact of the matter was obvious, the blast so powerful she felt it in her teeth. When the driver started moving it was in reverse, arcing around over rubble and crushed bodies and who knew what else. Then, there was a moment of stillness—she imagined more rocket launchers, soon to open fire on a sitting target—and the Chimera finally lurched forward, leaving behind its injured companion.

"Where are we headed, ma'am?" a Pirean trooper asked the commissar.

"We'll try to link up with our surviving forces elsewhere in the city. Beyond that—"

Bolter shells pounded on the outside of the armor, sending spalls flying through the passenger cabin. Mrita caught one in the hand and cursed. The hot fleck of metal hadn't injured her seriously, but it would leave a blister.

"Beyond that," the commissar went on, "we'll have to improvise."

The Chimera rocked and jolted around them. There didn't seem to be any more hostile fire, at least not for the moment.

"How long 'til we plan a counterattack?" Enthilde asked, from the front of the cabin, where the lone medic was wrapping layers of gauze around her shoulder. Morphine slurred her speech. "There's evil on this planet, everywhere we look—"

"Hold still!" the medic cut in.

"—and we have to destroy it. No mercy, no fear. If I could still fight I… " She grimaced as the medic injected her with another shot of painkillers. "I'd be the first to go back out there."

"I admire your zeal, guardsman, but it is premature to talk of cleansing this world for good, when we ourselves are hunted. Rest, now, and gather your strength—the Emperor protects."

"He does."

Enthilde smiled. Mrita scowled.

These people put their faith in the Emperor because they were dealing with forces they didn't understand, and they didn't understand them because the Imperium denied they existed. How long had the High Lords of Terra covered up the fact of Chaos? Since the time of Horus, probably—Horus, whom the teachers at her schola had painted as the arch-traitor, a man so consumed by ambition that he had allied with dark powers and rebelled against the Emperor Himself.

But what if Horus' only heresy had been to recognize that Chaos was real? What if he'd meant to enlighten mankind? Lying about reality did not protect against it, and in such dangerous times as these, humanity _had_ to know what powers truly ruled the universe, lest the Imperium's delusions plunge them all—

"Private! Tell me your name."

She looked up at the commissar, trying consciously to remove the scowl from her face. "Uh, Mrita Konvalos, ma'am."

"You did very well today, Private Konvalos. I will recommend you for a medal. To go toe-to-toe with a traitor Space Marine is an uncommon feat of valor—winning, even less common."

"She's a true hero, ma'am," Enthilde spoke up. "The Emperor guided her bayonet."

"Yes," Mrita said, choking down her disgust. "I felt His hand at work as I struck the heretic. But, ma'am, to be fair, you landed the killing blow."

Vant waved dismissively. "Unlike you, I had more than just faith and a lasgun. I wish all His servants fought as ferociously as you did today."

Mrita nodded. "Thank you, ma'am. It is an honor."

The Chimera turned a corner, sending her lurching into a wall. Bullets ricocheted off the armor—a nest of heretics, probably, shooting out of some apartment window—and the autocannon fired a few shots in return before the little three-vehicle convoy was out of range. Without windows she couldn't tell where they were headed.

She realized, now, on the jolting drive away from the battlefield, while adrenaline faded and fatigue set in, that she _had_ felt a divine hand. Not the Emperor's, but the Blood God's. He had been a faint presence on the edge of her consciousness, sharpening her reflexes and bolstering her muscles, cackling in delight with every drop of blood she spilled. It didn't even seem to matter that the person she'd killed was his own servant—he demanded only death.

Mrita had provided it.


	4. Chapter 4

There were just thirty-one survivors, in three of her regiment's Chimeras, traveling westward to link up with another unit—the stony, unknowable 212st Krieg—that may have held out against the heretics in the ruins of an old fortress. They didn't have any other options. Last anybody had checked, the 12th Valhallans next door had been annihilated to a woman, and the Eighth Pireans and 117th Mordians were gone, too, save for this motley band Commissar Vant had put together, the highest-ranking member of which was a sergeant.

They were outnumbered a hundred to one. Each street they entered presented fresh possibilities of landmines, snipers, and ambushes. All the civilians of this city, it seemed, had fled, joined the heretics, or perished where they'd stood—every ten minutes or so, the Guard rolled past another blood-splattered cluster of loyalists who had been surrounded and slaughtered in their makeshift fortifications.

Slaughtered like beasts. Pitilessly. There was no glory in it, yet this was Mrita's future, if she followed Vant and Enthilde and the others to their inevitable destination. Her guts would be spread across the streets of this awful backwater planet, in the name of a corpse god who didn't know her name and had no power to stop the madness going on around her.

Hours passed. One of the Chimeras broke down, so twelve people—Mrita included, she drew a short straw—had to walk alongside the two remaining vehicles.

"Try to raise them again!" ordered Vant, soon after sunrise, when they were trudging through terraced hab blocks that had largely collapsed into the street. The guardsmen's shadows stretched long on the rubble ahead of them.

"I think I'm almost getting something," replied Private Guidsan, the Mordian vox operator. The vehicles' fragile built-in antennae hadn't survived the heretic bolters, so to improve his reception as much as possible, he and his equipment were balanced precariously atop the lead Chimera. Up there it was only a matter of time before some sniper put a las-bolt through his head. "Yes… yes! It's the Krieg regiment! They're still holding out!"

Several people perked up at that. Mrita didn't. Their allies were about sixty kilometers away, and the Pireans would only have covered ten by nightfall, so one unit or the other would probably be annihilated before they finally met up.

"Let me talk to them, private." Vant climbed up onto the Chimera and spoke into the transmitter. "This is Commissar Emilia Vant, leading the remnants of the Eighth Pireans and the 117th Mordians. We're past the Jeweled District. Enemy action has been light so far, but the heretics are massing for more attacks. Can you give us an update on your situation?"

Indistinct chatter spilled from the other end, none of it sounding particularly encouraging. Vant's expression fell. "I see. How many did you sa—right. I'd best not keep you for long. We will reinforce as soon as we can, and until then, lieutenant, walk in the Emperor's light."

She jumped back off the roof, though the vox operator stayed there and fiddled with his equipment. The twelve footsoldiers trudged over piles of rubble as their Chimeras rumbled along beside them.

"Bad news?" asked Maukan. She and Enthilde were the only other survivors of Mrita's original squad.

"You could say so. They've encountered the enemy's second wave, and they're apparently down to fifty, sixty people remaining."

"They're Krieg," Mrita put in, scowling, not quite checking herself before she spoke. "Should be happy to die in droves."

Vant shot her a stern glance. "As should you, guardsman. Even a woman who has nothing can lay down her life."

"True, ma'am." She affected the sign of the Aquila. "The Emperor prote—"

The ionized-air crack of a lasbolt rang out, and the vox operator tumbled off the Chimera's roof, a steaming red hole blown through his skull. Vant reacted quickly. She drew her sidearm, shouted for the soldiers around her to take cover, but none of them needed to be reminded. Within a second Mrita had dived behind the remnants of a wall and shouldered her lasgun.

"Fucking sniper!" someone shouted. "Did anybody see where the shot came from?"

"East. That tower." Vant pointed with her chainsword, a pose for the propaganda reels, and voxed, "Chimeras, I want our guns strafing the building with the silver aquila hanging above the third-storey windows. Should make those heretics keep their heads down."

Another shot caught a second guardsman, one of the Pireans in flak armor, who sprayed lasbolts as she fell convulsing to the ground. Both vehicles fired autocannons in retaliation. Further away, concrete chipped in plumes off the face of the building Vant had indicated.

"That'll buy us some time," the commissar said. "Forward, guardsmen! Just another dozen meters and we'll be out of their line of fire!"

They trotted ahead as a group, aiming to put an office block between themselves and the sniper. As Mrita ran she looked again towards the enemy position. Up in one of those distant windows, she thought she saw the barrel of a lasgun glinting in the sun, undeterred by the brief spate of shells sent its way. It flashed red light—

"I'm hit!"

Maukan's voice. Mrita couldn't see her, because she couldn't see anything; the sniper's lasbolt had passed close enough for some light to spill out and blind her. Permanently, perhaps. A wall of searingly bright red faded to black.

"Dammit! Faster!" That was Vant. Boots crunched on gravel and Mrita smelled cooked flesh, while more lasgun shots cracked nearby, either her comrades' or the enemy's.

The world was black, hot, loud, as if she wore a sack over her head while someone was beating her with a truncheon. She tumbled to the ground, dropping her rifle in the process, and in the rubble a piece of broken rebar sliced across her cheek. People cried out around her:

"It's a fucking ambush!"

"They're right above us!"

"The windows! Get the windows!"

"Out of the Chimeras! Find firing positions! Move, guardsmen!"

There was an explosion, a wave of heat and pressure against her face, and all Mrita could hear for some time was an attenuated whistle. And screams.

Now, more of the cooked flesh smell. People were on fire.

She groped around for her lasgun, and finally found it wedged in a tangle of metal debris. A quick squeeze of the trigger confirmed that it still worked. As she stood up again, someone grabbed her by the arm, guiding her the rest of the way to her feet. She spun to face whoever it was.

"Mrita, it's me!"

"Enthilde? You're wounded, you're in no condition to help."

"Still in better shape than you are. Come."

Mrita nodded, and Enthilde led her off in some unknown direction, while around them the skirmish seemed to diminish. There were fewer las-shots, fewer desperate cries for help. That didn't stop her from nearly tripping over a body.

"Down here." Enthilde let go of her after they'd moved into some sort of shelter, where Mrita's arms brushed against rough, fractured walls. "It'll be safe, I'll hold them off."

Enthilde trotted away with no further comment. Her bayonet scraped against concrete, and just beyond the doorway she let off a burst of las-fire at an unknown opponent. Mrita clutched her own weapon even though she knew she could do nothing with it.

Outside, Vant's chainsword growled furiously, then made a much lower noise as it cleaved through something thick and wet. "Ruin to the enemies of the Emperor!" the commissar shouted. "Have courage, guardsmen! We are driving them from the field!"

Easy for her to say. She wasn't sitting in a hole, blinded, abandoned utterly by Him on Terra.

The minutes passed. More fighting, though it definitely was dying down, her own side victorious. The burning of the wrecked Chimera was a soft murmur, punctuated by groaning metal and the crackle of ammunition cooking off.

Towards the end, Mrita recovered her sight, just in time to look out from the bottom of a cellar and see Vant walking tall across the battlefield, pistol in hand, delivering the Emperor's mercy to heretics and mortally wounded guardsmen alike.


	5. Chapter 5

"It wasn't a battle, not really," Vant was saying. "More of a skirmish. Couldn't have been more than twenty of them, the sniper out east and those heretics at close range."

Vant sat on the side of the road, sheltered by a tarp, which she shared with Mrita and Enthilde. The mighty truly had fallen: this commissar's greatcoat was tattered, her hair disheveled, her cap still missing, and as she spoke, she flipped aimlessly through a worn, damp copy of _The Sayings of Saint Elisarus the Redeemer_, like a child prodding at the body of a dead parent. Mrita pitied her, this doomed believer in the Emperor's light.

"What's making them hold back?" Enthilde asked. She was back on combat duty, simply because she could stand and hold a rifle with her good arm.

"Most of them have withdrawn. Where, I'm not sure, but surely the heretics have battles to fight elsewhere on this planet. They only need their reserve forces to take on a little band like us."

There were twenty survivors encamped here, precariously fortified against the rain and the grey cityscape brooding around them. Everybody else was dead or missing. Vox was silent. Occasionally, there were outbreaks of las-fire somewhere in the distance, but nobody could tell if they were other pockets of Imperial resistance or just the traitors fighting amongst themselves.

"Where are we going from here?" Mrita asked, only because she intended to run in the opposite direction.

"Hard to say, guardsman. Probably towards the Krieg regiment, if any of them are left, and we'll hopefully encounter more Guard forces along the way."

"We can still make it out?" Enthilde asked.

"If He wills it, yes. Otherwise we shall die in His service, but that is no terrible fate—better than the corruption and damnation of our souls."

Nobody said anything after that. Enthilde just lowered her head in silent prayer, making the sign of the aquila across her breastplate, while Vant went back to picking through that corpse-venerating tome of hers, disintegrating the pages just a little bit more every time her wet, grimy fingers touched them.

Mrita planned her escape.

There were several factors in her favor: first, the city was filled with hiding places, so if she slipped away it wouldn't be like, say, staging a prison break across open ground. Second, Vant only had twenty people, not enough to spare any trying to hunt down a deserter. Third, if she planned things right and departed while alone on sentry duty, nobody would even think to look for her until she'd been missing for an hour or two.

She would run off during the night and leave the others to their fate. Then… well, she didn't know what to expect, but at least she'd be better off alone, not condemned to die alongside these fanatics.

Chaos would take her in. If she chose that.

It was only pragmatic, she supposed, to leave the doomed side for the winning one, and in this war, it was not hard to tell which was which. The Blood God was a better patron than the Emperor had ever been.

* * *

Mrita had four hours of rest that night, followed by four hours of sentry duty on the fringes of their makeshift camp. She curled up beneath a tarp, listening to the patter of rain overhead, and did her best to sleep wearing a full set of flak armor. Dealing with aches and pains in the morning would be better than waking up to a firefight unarmored.

So she slept, and as she slept she dreamt, just as she had the previous night.

War. Wastelands. Fields of execution under fiery skies.

Into this otherworldly battle she carried an axe, its blade wickedly serrated and humming with energy. Flesh and armor yielded like gelatin. It was not long before the enemy broke into a rout, turning and fleeing, utterly helpless against the wild swings of her weapon as she ran them down.

Mrita wasn't fully sure who "they" were. Tyranids and heretics, like last time, along with scores of others, civilians and Astartes and faceless, shapeless things. Sometimes she was joined by the crimson-skinned demons of the Warp, horned and hoofed. Sometimes she fought alone. Blood spilled, and her god laughed, pleased that she was fighting again—not blinded, weak, cowering helplessly in a cellar.

Someone shook her shoulder, and she woke quickly. Enthilde was sitting up next to her in the tent.

"They're changing watches, Mrita. We're up."

Mrita nodded, and grabbed her rifle from beside her. "Then I suppose we ought to get out there."

This was it: her last night in the service of Him on Terra. As she stood and left the tarp, tightly clutching the lasgun in her hands, she wondered what freedom would feel like.

"Spotted anyone?" she asked one of the guardsmen standing watch on the north perimeter, where she and Enthilde were due as replacements.

The man—Private Virlen, she thought his name was—shook his head. "Apart from a few civvie scavengers, it's as quiet as any place I've ever seen."

She looked him over. A sad sight, like most of the rest of these people—his blue Mordian tunic was more of a brown now, and grazing hits from heretic blades had ripped the fabric, in one place causing the uniform to hang open like a gaping maw. The man beneath all that was thin and hollow-cheeked.

"Well, you go get some rest, now," Enthilde said, taking Virlen's position behind a concrete traffic barrier repurposed into a barricade. The Mordian nodded gratefully, and walked with his comrades back to the main camp, just forty meters behind them.

That left Mrita and Enthilde standing close together, gazing over the concrete into the dark, shattered roadway beyond.

Sounds of muted voices and rustling tarps came from the encampment. From the city, there was only the scrabbling of vermin, and the trickle of rainwater rolling down walls.

"I don't think we're going to make it out of here," Enthilde said.

Mrita raised an eyebrow. "You don't believe our own commissar?"

"Commissar Vant doesn't expect us to survive, either. Like the rest of us, she's getting ready for our last stand."

By the time that happened it wouldn't be Mrita's problem anymore. She would be long gone, disappeared into the night to pursue her own destiny.

All she had to do now was escape Enthilde. The closest sentries were stationed in the half-collapsed hab block beside them, and in the burnt-out wreck of a PDF Chimera twenty meters away, so nobody else would be able to reach her before she slipped out of sight. Simple.

From there she would pass the heretic armies, killing and stealing from any easy targets among them. She would be a killer in the shadows, surviving by her blade and wits, leaving behind a trail of corpses as sacrifices to the Blood God—alive, and free.

She looked over at Enthilde. Her shoulder plate was removed, replaced with soiled gauze, but nevertheless she cut an impressive figure—this soldier stood as tall as ever, built solidly, her finger ready by her lasgun's trigger, and she gazed over the barricade with cobalt-blue eyes. If Enthilde followed Mrita, she too could find a place in a new, more cutthroat world.

And if she didn't, she would die. Horribly, most likely, perhaps hit with a flamer and burned to death, or else subjected to some heretic's creative tortures, gutted and hung living from a signpost. Would it be a mercy to kill her now and spare her that future suffering?

"Enthilde?" she spoke up, watching a faint, flickering glow splash across a wall down the road, probably the dim reflection of some promethium spill burning out of sight.

"Yes?"

"It doesn't have to be like this."

Enthilde looked over at her. A strand of black hair streaked down into the middle of her forehead, and Mrita was reminded of an icon she'd seen, in a chapel back home, where the Emperor's locks had fallen just the same way. It had been a deliberate touch by the artist, humanizing a god. Probably the artist had later been executed for heresy.

"What do you mean? This is our lot as Guardsmen: to fight, die, and be miserable."

"You think we'll ever be rewarded for that?"

"Of course. The souls of the faithful soar at His right hand."

Mrita chuckled, balefully. "You've seen the same things I have. Against them, the Emperor can't help us—"

"The Emperor protects."

"Yeah, maybe if we were on Terra, but we're out here, on the far end of the galaxy, fighting powers spawned straight from the Warp."

Enthilde glared at her, baring her teeth. "The. Emperor. Protects. Deny that and I will take this to Commissar Vant."

She really was faithful, it seemed—despite everything, there were no chinks in her armor, no fractures to exploit.

"Right." Mrita tightened her grip on her weapon, watched the silhouette of the bayonet against the ground. "Then I'm sorry."

She skewered Enthilde from the throat upwards. It happened very quickly, in fact it was over before she'd really had time to register what she was doing, and then Mrita was just standing there, frozen, holding her weapon and by extension holding her bleeding, gurgling friend who would otherwise have collapsed to the ground. The blade had made it past the roof of her mouth, maybe to the middle of the skull. Enthilde twitched, her eyes wide and frightened, while hot blood gushed out in rhythmic spurts, cascading down the side of Mrita's lasgun.

"I'm sorry," Mrita repeated, and her eyes began to water, her hands trembled, but she felt something else as well: satisfaction.

To take a life was to wield power. It was to override another being's survival instinct, and replace it with one's own murderous will. To shred, to maim, to dispense death with impunity…

She let Enthilde slide off the bayonet. Then her friend was a pile of armor and limp flesh at her feet, all but dead, only able to make a wet rasping sound from a ruined throat.

Where to go, now? Would she leap over the barricade and sprint to freedom? The street stretched long in front of her, roofs and balconies sagged on either side as if the very architecture had been drained of life, and she feared to take the first step.

A crack of las-fire streaked past her head. It was a near-miss, and she wouldn't have another warning. Mrita turned to see the sentry in the ruined hab block, on her left, about to gun her down from a second-story window.

"Drop your weapon, in the name of the Emperor!"

Mrita looked her straight in the eyes. This sentry was a Pirean, a familiar yet anonymous face from her regiment, and her wavering features betrayed a reluctance to do what Mrita had just done—kill one of her own.

It was her loss. Mrita raised her lasgun and took down the guardsman with two shots, straight to the chest. Again she felt the thrill of victory, the presence of the Blood God egging her on, and she turned back to face the main encampment, where hurried voices and stamping feet announced that somebody had heard the gunfire. In the darkness she could see little, but that worked in her favor as well.

Mrita had to kill again. Leaving behind Enthilde's corpse, and that of the guardsman in the window—the other sentry, in the burnt-out Chimera, was nowhere to be seen—she stalked back towards camp, hugging the side of the street, her feet brushing against refuse and making her passage louder than she would have liked. No matter. Soon enough, she'd declare her presence anyway.

"North!" she heard somebody shout. "We need people on the north! One of the Pireans has turned traitor!"

That would be the missing sentry. He was a black silhouette against the faintly bluish arch of a stone doorway, and beyond him, in the lightless street, other silhouettes moved as guardsmen scrambled out of their makeshift shelters. In the very middle of the encampment, their last surviving Chimera swiveled its turret.

Mrita crouched low to the ground and studied her surroundings. The buildings on this road had few entrances, but she could hide in them if she had to.

Thus she could stalk the city ruins and kill at her leisure.

The halfway crumbled wall of a chapel rose to her left. She mounted a ramp of fallen blocks to a ledge, about a meter wide. Statues of hooded saints perched atop it, except where gunfire had blasted them to pieces, and with a light drizzle starting again the stone was slippery beneath her feet. She crouched atop the ledge and scanned the street below.

Three troopers had come up to meet the sentry. Most of the rest were still beneath their shelters, or groggily emerging from them, and Commissar Vant, to her credit, had marched to the center of the action.

"Which Pirean?" she asked.

"I don't know their names," replied the Mordian. "But I think the murderer was the skinny one, with red hair."

Mrita crept closer, close enough to see Vant clench her fists. She was pressed right up to the ledge and nobody had spotted her yet. Part of her rebelled against sneaking around when she could be killing.

"Private Konvalos. Wouldn't have expected her to turn traitor," the commissar said, and then, more loudly, "Anyone who doesn't already have a post, start searching the north perimeter, in fireteams. If Konvalos doesn't immediately drop her weapon, shoot her. Let's go!"

Vant would give her the courtesy of capture and _then_ execution. Considerate. Mrita knew that if she turned now and ran, nobody on the Imperial side would be able to find her again, but that thought didn't prompt more than a momentary glance over her shoulder—she couldn't turn down this slaughter when it was so temptingly _close_.

To take out twenty soldiers on her own, to best a commissar in single combat… these were great things, and the Blood God called her to achieve them.

"Up there!"

A las-bolt carved a chunk of stone from the wall next to her. She'd been spotted, and it hadn't taken long. More shots followed, one managing to graze her, sending a hot spear of pain flashing up her arm but likely doing little serious damage. The guardsmen firing were a cluster of three standing abreast, lasguns raised in a pale shadow of the Mordians' signature volley. They were a few meters away and within the range of a running jump. She howled ferally at them, and made the leap.

While her landing was painful, nothing broke—maybe that was the favor of her patron strengthening her bones, keeping her in the fight. The three Mordians were now close enough for her to almost feel their breath. It was point-blank range, bayonet range, and she knew she was very potent with a bayonet.

Mrita stabbed the lead man through the chest. Two cracks shuddered back up her rifle, first the piercing of his under-tunic armor and then the breaking of his ribcage. He gurgled wetly like Enthilde had.

She pulled her rifle to the left, taking him with it, using his bulk to slam the man standing beside him. When the blade tore free it sent an arc of blood flying onto the third Mordian, who was already thrusting a bayonet straight at her.

She knocked it aside with her own lasgun. He still had inertia, while she held her ground, and they collided, hard, a tangle of bodies and weapons slamming into each other.

With her free hand Mrita found his eye sockets, clawed at them. Her fingers ripped through blood and tissue and hot clear fluid; he screamed and thrashed, dropping his rifle, then fell helpless to the pavement. A kick to the face knocked his jaw loose and Mrita was on to the next target.

There was still the man she'd hit with his comrade's body, now recovered from the impact and groping around in the dim light for his weapon. She put a bayonet between his eyes.

"Death to the Corpse Emperor!" she shouted, bending down over his collapsing body. She spat on the brass Aquila pinned to the Mordian's breast. The Emperor was a rotten lie, and she despised that, despised the creed that venerated a corpse on Terra while denying the true gods of the Warp.

More lasguns fired her way. They were red columns streaking through space, searingly bright, even though the air scattered only a tiny fraction of each beam's energy. She dropped to the ground to seek shelter amid two corpses and one blinded, writhing survivor.

There looked to be two or three people shooting from the next patch of cover, a transport lorry someone had rammed into a wall. Their fire was rapid and alarmingly accurate. She was pinned, but she wouldn't let that stop her—she grabbed the man she'd stabbed through the forehead, lifted him up to use as a crude shield, strained to support a corpse half again her weight.

Her muscles rose to the challenge. She felt strong, energized, invigorated by the Warp itself—and with the dead Mordian held across her chest, bleeding all over her armor, she charged the enemy position ahead. Shots blasted steaming chunks off the corpse-shield but did not touch her.

Mrita passed the edge of the crashed lorry, unscathed. The advantage was hers. The initiative was hers. She ruled the battlefield, and these weak, Emperor-worshiping fools knew to _fear_ her.

With a burst of las-shots she took out both guardsmen behind the lorry. They slumped, their flak armor riddled with holes. One of them was a Pirean Mrita used to eat lunch with.

She kept moving, restless and desperate, aware that standing still invited the Imperials to gun her down. Someone fired from further down the road, within the encampment, and Mrita replied in kind, until her rifle petered out like a clogged faucet.

That was the end of her power pack. She couldn't remember where she'd put the others, but they weren't on her—the bayonet would have to do, for now. Somehow she liked that more.

A grenade flew at her, though the throw was more of a fumble. It detonated several meters away, on the other side of a waist-height chunk of stone, and the main effect was to give her a cloud of smoke to hide behind. She charged in.

"Private Konvalos!" Vant shouted, punctuating her sentence with a bolter shot. Amid the smoke Mrita couldn't quite make out where she was. "You have betrayed your Emperor, and you will face His judgment!"

Mrita ran towards the commissar's voice. She heard the whirring of a chainsword, too, and then she was past the smoke, facing Vant out in the middle of the ruined street.

This was a worthy opponent. If Mrita won now, her god would surely be pleased.

"Blood for the Blood God!" she breathed, leveling her weapon, savoring the kill to come. She scanned the cratered asphalt and abandoned vehicles around her; if there were any more guardsmen nearby, they were hiding, ready to support their commissar when the need arose.

Vant leaned forward, the chainsword raised in front of her. She dug her heels into the rubble. "Your god doesn't care about you, you know that? You're a tool to him. He'll see you die as soon as anybody else."

Mrita sneered. "What do you know about Chaos?"

"More than some Pirean private would." Vant smiled, her teeth the only pale surface on a scratched and grimy face. "Fight me. You have the Blood God Khorne, I have the Emperor."

Khorne. A true name for her deity, at last, and its sound was properly harsh, aggressive, hateful.

Mrita screamed and thrust her bayonet towards Commissar Vant. The blade never hit home—the commissar swung her chainsword to parry, metal grinding against metal and forcing Mrita to divert to the side lest her rifle be cut in half entirely. She came to a halt holding a lasgun with a hot jagged gash in front of the trigger.

"You won't accomplish very much with that, heretic," Vant said, panting. The short clash had been enough to take her breath away. "Why don't you—"

Mrita attacked again, this time more deftly, feinting at Vant's chest before diving to slash a blow across her stomach. The bayonet tore through fabric and came out bloody. Vant screamed.

There was nothing much to say—Mrita was a killer, she didn't have time to make speeches like the commissar. She just regained her footing and prepared a follow-up thrust.

Vant made another swing before she could do so. Mrita was quick enough to dodge, so it didn't touch her, but it did knock her off-balance, and when Vant swiped a third time, the teeth of the chainblade rushing in a curve of steel mere centimeters from her face, she nearly fell onto her back.

Perhaps this was just a diversion. Vant had challenged her to a duel so that some guardsman could line up a clear shot at her. Then again, the woman never shied from melee combat—in another life she might have made an excellent servant of the Blood God.

Mrita lunged with her rifle one last time, throwing her weight forward. Vant cut the weapon in half on the way. But Mrita kept going, now wielding a jagged stump of hot metal rather than a bayonet, and with it she hit her enemy in the shoulder blade. Bone gave way with a crack.

Vant, for her part, grazed her free hand and cut off several fingers. The pain was hot and tight and pinching. But it was the pain of a warrior—Mrita howled and continued her attack, with still more vigor.

The commissar was starting to flag. She had a better weapon and more training, but she was slow, and her movements betrayed a lack of energy. The reason was clear enough: her god truly wasn't on her side.

Mrita landed two more hits with the stump of her lasgun. Her good hand clutched the rifle grip, her injured one pushed down from the top to give the blows more power. Vant stumbled backwards a ways. Then, she rallied, and parried the half-lasgun in midair, her sword cutting deeper and deeper, almost to Mrita's wounded hand pushing from the other side. Every circuit of the chainsword's teeth carved out another hot ribbon of metal.

Then, the blade seized up. Mechanisms somewhere in the hilt growled in protest. Mrita gave another hard shove, and the chainsword slipped from Vant's hand, taking the rifle with it. Vant fell backwards and Mrita landed on top of her.

They were on the ground, bare-handed, rolling among rocks and bolter casings and other detritus.

"Commissar!" someone shouted. In her peripheral vision Mrita saw guardsmen looking on in horror. But nobody dared to shoot into the fray—nobody dared to risk killing a commissar.

Vant clawed at her, scratched Mrita's face and pulled out tufts of her hair, but the pain didn't matter. All she cared about was crushing the life from this blind, spineless servant of the hated Imperium—

Mrita's fingers brushed past a jagged chunk of concrete about the size of her fist. She grabbed hold of it, lifted it high, then plunged it down into the commissar's face. The motion came as naturally as walking.

"Blood for the Blood God!"

Bone cracked. She hit again. Vant screamed, until the only thing leaving her mouth was a slurry of blood mixed with teeth.

"Blood for Khorne!"

Skin sloughed off. A few more blows, and Vant's face caved in, and she stopped struggling—Mrita only roared in triumph, and struck again, and again, and again…

* * *

Dawn came. The clouds had mostly cleared up, and the sun shone behind a lingering haze of smoke from some distant firestorm. Mrita walked alone through the streets. Silent shattered walls rose everywhere she looked. Her only weapon was Vant's chainsword, which scraped as she dragged it behind her.

Her mangled hand was unbandaged and sporadically dripped blood, and with the three fingers she had left—really two and a half—she clutched strands of blonde hair, from which dangled the remains of Vant's head.

She'd killed something like fifteen, sixteen people. A few survivors had escaped her wrath, but none of them would last long, not in a city now controlled by the Ruinous Powers. Wandering heretic bands and lone murderers would take care of them.

She'd lost her helmet a while ago, and her body armor was pockmarked, dented in places, spattered with blood in many others. Her footsteps were loud, thumping and crunching over every stretch of ground. Here, she passed a statue of the Emperor, decapitated and defaced with gory Chaos stars; there, she encountered a knot of hunched, huddled things, batlike creatures that had once been people, feasting on a pile of entrails and nothing else.

Roads stretched on in the spreading light. Mrita had no clear idea of where she was going.

Somewhere past the ruined Cathedral of Saint Celestine she found the bodies of one thousand civilians, all of them flayed alive, cut to pieces, and sewn back together, piled up two or three storeys. She saw how small some of those corpses were, and vomited.

This was Chaos. This was the power she had chosen, in all its horrific glory, and there was no going back. Faith was gone, decency was gone. Enthilde was gone, too—she lay on the ground somewhere with her throat cut open.

Mrita blinked away the beginnings of tears. Enough of that. Weakness wouldn't serve her in this new life.

She heard heretics scurrying around, in a building to her left. She turned to look. There were maybe five or six, peering out from the windows, some apparently unarmed, others clutching scavenged lasguns. They weren't shooting at her, though—they seemed more curious than anything else. As well they should have been, when a blood-soaked guardsman walked into their midst holding a chainsword and a head.

Mrita shouted at them. "I bring the severed head of an Imperial commissar!"

She held her trophy at arm's length—nobody would recognize it, but she also had the commissarial sash tied around her shoulder, proof enough should they dispute her claim. Heretics muttered among themselves.

Would they take her in? She didn't know. But Chaos was a faith that accepted converts, more widely and indiscriminately than the Imperial Cult ever did.

"Who are you?" someone shouted back. His voice was thin and reedy.

"Private Mrita Konvalos. Formerly of the Eighth Pireans." She spoke without feeling. "I have renounced the Emperor and chosen to serve the Ruinous Powers of the Warp. My devotion is to the Blood God Khorne, and in his name, I slew my entire unit."

There was no response, initially; she heard someone clamber down a ladder inside the building. Whether these people happened to be passing through, or were using it as a base camp, she did not know.

A door opened on the ground floor and three heretics came out to meet her. Those flanking were former PDF troops, carrying lasguns, dressed in cobbled-together armor daubed with crude Chaos stars and other runes. Fangs jutted from the jaw of the woman on the right, while her comrade on the left sported a patch of festering pustules.

Their leader, then, was a short man wearing an officer's uniform—a greatcoat, almost commissarial—and what looked to be a scalp stretched to form a makeshift pauldron. His movements were ungainly, as if controlled by a bad puppetmaster. Beneath his skin, flesh seemed to writhe of its own accord, in sinuous patterns her eyes could not quite follow.

Mrita grimaced and felt sick again.

_These_ were her new friends.

"We always accept converts to the true faith," the heretic said, spreading his arms. "More hands and minds to fight the Corpse Emperor's lies. Our band, particularly, venerates Chaos in all its forms." He gestured at the woman with fangs, and the diseased man. "A servant of the Blood God is welcome—so long as you spill others' blood and not ours."

"I want to kill," Mrita said.

"And you will have the chance." The heretic smiled. He had too many teeth, of uneven sizes. "Welcome, Mrita, to the path of glory."

* * *

Author's Note: Thanks for making it to the end! I hope this was as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write. For my next story I'm thinking about continuing the tale of Mrita Konvalos, charting her rise in the brutal world of Chaos; alternately, I might start a separate sci-fi/horror piece about the Abyssal Crusade, in which thirty Space Marine chapters plunged into the Eye of Terror itself. If either of those sound interesting to you, leave a review and let me know!


	6. The Gods' Favoured

Author's Note: Gifts of the Blood God is back, by popular demand! I intend to update it about weekly, with chapters ranging from 1400 to 4000 words, and the total length might end up around 40,000 words, if not more. Thanks for all your support so far!

* * *

Mrita gritted her teeth as the needle went in and out of her skin, dragging thread behind it, steadily closing the bloody stumps where three of her fingers had been.

"Almost done," said the medic, Ilas Zaner, a dark-skinned young man in PDF flak armour. On the surface, he wasn't as far gone as the rest of this heretic company—the Gods' Favoured, they called themselves—and if he hadn't had the eight-pointed star scratched into his cheek, he might have fit in with the regiment he'd come from. No mutations, yet. Like Mrita.

They were sitting on a supply crate in an abandoned hab-block, in a room shared with some ten other heretics, all minding their own business. A shell hit had taken the roof and about half the floor area. Civilian corpses lay piled and rotting wherever there was space.

Bloodshed was everywhere, for the rebels had just finished the frenzied, thorough work of butchering this city's million inhabitants. Only when the Tyranids invaded Pirea had she seen death on such a scale.

"How many do you think are left?" Mrita asked, wincing as the needle made it through her middle finger. The sutures were crude, but they were better than open wounds, and the last thing she needed was to die of infection after enduring so much.

Zaner did not look from her mangled hand. "How many of what?"

"People in this city. Did you"—she remembered what team she was on, now—"did we set out to kill everybody, or did we spare those who might be useful to us?"

"We killed all who did not accept the truth of Chaos. Our mission is to convert, as the Dark Saint commands us."

Mrita frowned. "I don't understand. Who is the Dark Saint?"

At that, Zaner did raise his head, and he gave her a smug grin. "You poor, ignorant corpse-worshiper. You really don't know of Azryl the Silver-Tongued, the Dark Saint, the Prophet of Pain? He is the reason we are all here."

"Nobody in the Guard ever mentioned him."

"Of course they didn't. The Imperium is founded on lies and deception. If you'd ever had the chance to hear him speak, you would have joined our cause much, much earlier."

"Explain."  
"You see, Azryl is the voice of this planet's rebellion, exhorting us to overthrow the rotting Imperial government and claim this planet for the dark gods—our war is no simple uprising, but rather a mass spiritual awakening among the people."

"Some of the people." A few blocks away was that horrid pile of one thousand flayed corpses, and she could smell it from all the way out here. Chaos promised liberation, yes, but it had nothing in the way of kindness, or mercy, or reason.

"We have awoken those whom the gods inspired to listen."

He finished the sutures. Mrita's injury was still a mess, but less so, now, and the throbbing pain had subsided just enough for her to ignore it. Zaner went on, "Watch the wound. If the stitches come undone, tell me, and if you want to keep that hand, avoid getting any guts or filth on it. You'd be better off without catching the blessings of Nurgle."

"Nurgle?"

Zaner grinned again. Mrita decided she had tired of him. "Nurgle. The Plague Lord. Do you know _any_ of the gods, or should I fetch the Book of Lorgar to educate you? It's ten thousand volumes long, I suggest you start studying."

"I know of Khorne. The only god that matters to me."

"Ah, a Khorne worshiper! Too busy collecting blood and skulls to care about anything else. Well, if your small, angry mind can't handle the mysteries of Chaos, that's all right."

She stood and clenched her fists. Khorne would reward her if she tore Zaner's head off, right here and right now, though that might not endear her with the men and women of the Gods' Favoured.

"Thank you for your help, Zaner. I will be on my way." Mrita picked up her dead commissar's chainsword, which she'd propped up against the side of the crate, and turned to leave. She did not fully know where to go next; the heretic who'd welcomed her outside the building—Captain Gerathus, the commander of this motley company—had only directed her to see Zaner and get her hand patched up.

As she walked across the room, a few of her new comrades looked up and took her measure. They were sitting by the wall, most of them tending to their weapons, one reading passages from some arcane text. A pious crowd, these heretics. Their eyes were wary. Mrita raised her chainsword and tightened her jaw, suspecting that nothing but a show of strength would get across to them.

Then the door swung open, up ahead, and a trio of soldiers rushed into the room. They sprayed bullets. She was not the target—behind her, Zaner collapsed to the floor, and the shooting stopped.

By reflex she had powered on her chainsword, ready to defend herself.

"Stand down!" shouted the lead soldier, garbed in patchwork armor and skulls over Administratum robes. She was much taller than Mrita, and bulkier, with one arm grown thicker than anyone could manage naturally. "Are you the fresh meat the captain told me about?"  
"Mrita Konvalos." She realized she was probably speaking to her new commanding officer, and lowered her chainsword. The whir of teeth subsided to a mere grumble and then silence. "At your service, ma'am."

"I'm Sergeant Inna Hotchkins, Second Squad. You, and the rest of the miserable lot in this room, are under my command."

Mrita glanced over her shoulder at the twitching corpse of their medic, lying faceup on the ground.

"He was planning to kill me," Hotchkins went on. "I got him first. The first rule, if you haven't figured it out already, is to watch your back."

Mrita nodded. "Right."

She imagined a long rivalry, months of resentment and envy and scheming, all culminating in the doorway execution she had just happened to witness.

Hotchkins raised her voice so that the whole room could hear. "Now that we've got that business taken care of, I have orders for you. We will fight today."

"Against whom?" asked the heretic with the tome. He was thin and bony, and carried a slugthrower pistol.

"Scouts say the Fellowship of Black Blood captured a supply dump by Jeretheus Square, in our territory. We're going to claim what's ours."

At that, the grim faces of the Chaos warband perked up, and a few even smiled. Blood and plunder beckoned, just as they had since the dawn of warfare.

"We will march there, kill anyone in our way, and take the supplies for ourselves," the sergeant went on. "I'll grant three days' rations to anyone who brings back five enemy heads—and for your faith, Chaos will give you much more. Now form up!"

Second Squad stood and made a ragged line along one wall of the room. Hotchkins marched down the row, inspecting her command, nodding at a favored few. She stopped and glared in front of Mrita.

"You. The newcomer." Hotchins pointed at her chainsword. "Is that your only weapon, soldier?"

"Yes. I would like a lasgun."

The sergeant laughed, as did a few of the other cultists. "Do the people around you _look_ like they all have lasguns?" In their hands Mrita spotted swords, glaives, stubbers—altogether, very few weapons on par with what she'd had in the Guard. "The blessing of the gods is all you need."

"As you say, ma'am." Her new patron preferred melee combat, anyway. She pressed the activation rune, relished the reassuring sound it made, then let it rest again.

"All right, let's move it!" Hotchkins shouted, raising her pistol towards the door. Around the weapon's barrel she had arranged a skull, with its jaw wide open as if screaming, and metal and bone seemed to have fused together under the Warp's transformative influence. It wasn't just people that mutated.

"We will drink their blood!" shouted one heretic.

"Praise the Four!" said another, waving the claw that had replaced her right hand.

"Praise the Four!" replied a chorus of voices roused for battle.

Mrita followed the others out the door, at a jog. She hardly knew who these people were, and their rituals and zeal baffled her, but that mattered not—she would walk onto the battlefield today, and kill, and by killing begin her new life.


	7. Chaos Undivided

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in getting this up. Enjoy!

* * *

Mrita sent another of the shambling, once-human monsters to the ground. Black blood spilled from its bisected torso, and various bits and pieces wriggled long after she'd made the cut.

"Temet! Varigan!" Sergeant Hotchkins shouted, pointing with her over-muscled arm. "Get the gunners behind that groundcar! Konvalos, go with them!"

Mrita did as ordered, sprinting five paces across the ruined street to meet two of her comrades—Temet and Varigan, she assumed—who were pressing forward with their loud chattering autoguns against a thicket of Nurglite cultists. A few bullets streaked by as she passed the ruined groundcar. The others provided helpful covering fire, but largely fought their own battles, shooting and slicing to either side of her.

That was one of the things about Chaos. Predictably, it had a looser fighting style than the Guard, and Hotchins' willingness to murder subordinates did not translate to discipline on the battlefield. Fifth Squad was a mad jumble, as were the squads around it. They swarmed around a few isolated, fortified pockets of the Fellowship of Black Blood, who now made their stand in the middle of a debris-strewn thoroughfare, reeking of corruption gifted by their god.

Mrita swung her chainsword vertically through one man's fat, bloated, three-eyed head, cleaving the skull while spraying herself with chunks of black ichor. At times like these she envied those other heretics who wore facemasks or scarves.

"Don't let these bastards cut you!" Hotchkins shouted. She was some ten meters away, shooting into a frenzied melee with no concern for her own troops, and unlike Mrita she had the luxury of staying at a distance from Nurglite filth.

Mrita had been contaminated several times over. As she carved through the enemy, entrails and pus and inky black blood steadily built up on her armor, running through the gaps and touching bare skin, where she sometimes felt the squirming of maggots. She tried not to think about succumbing to sickness and plague even after the last of the Fellowship had been cleared from the battlefield. With her wounded hand…

One cultist raised a lasgun at her, close enough that her bayonet scratched against Mrita's armor. Mrita chopped off the woman's hand before she could fire. She replied with a laugh, wet and gurgling, where any sane being would have screamed in pain, and Mrita shut her up on the backswing, when she brought the chainsword grinding into her ribcage.

This weapon did give her a definite advantage, against the Nurglites' rusty, filth-encrusted blades and the ramshackle glaives of her allies.

"Feel the gifts of the Plague Father!" said one cultist, approaching out of her peripheral vision. He was horrifically bloated, bags of liquid swelling beneath his skin with each passing second, and black blood poured out of every orifice. Mrita never got the chance to kill him, because he popped like a boil—he just burst, sending in all directions a tidal wave of fat, blood, intestines, noxious fumes, other horrors. The stench alone was enough to knock her off her feet. Gas burned her throat and lungs.

"Throne on Terra!" she cursed, gagging, momentarily forgetting her new loyalties. Her ears rang, but she did not stay on the ground for long—she still saw swollen, plague-blighted bodies fighting around her, and that meant more enemies to kill. The Blood God wouldn't let her rest until every one of them was dead.

She downed two more, with rapid, wild swings. One man she tried to decapitate, only to realize as she made the blow that he had no head—his neck was a stump, spurting black blood, yet he walked anyway. Mrita grimaced in disgust and cut his legs out from beneath him. He still moved, but he wasn't about to go anywhere.

"Traitor!" a plague cultist shouted, at one of the Gods' Favoured. "You have betrayed our father!"

The traitor in question was from Fifth Squad, Mrita thought, and even at a glance he was an obvious Nurgle worshiper, with a grossly distended stomach and a jaw hanging only from one end—yet here he was, fighting fellow devotees of the Plague Father. Did Nurgle amuse himself with infighting among his children, as Khorne did? Or was this fratricide?

As it happened, the disciple of the Gods' Favoured won the engagement, slicing open his foe's belly with a swing of his glaive. Somewhere, Khorne laughed, and Mrita smiled with him. In this galaxy of ceaseless bloodshed, he was the winner of every battle.

"We've almost routed them!" Hotchkins said. "Follow me, to the supply cache!"

She led the way into the nearby building, dispatching two of Nurgle's sons in the doorway with a full-auto burst, and Mrita maneuvered herself into the chaotic jumble of heretics behind her.

A Fellowship cultist charged into the entryway, spraying bullets from a stubber. In another moment he was thrown back, violently, leaving a trail of disrupted air, and Mrita traced it back to a small, unassuming heretic among her allies—someone she recognized, the heretic who'd been studying a tome back at their base camp. He was a psyker. She prayed to Khorne that he never found reason to use that sorcery against her, for what good was a chainsword against a foe who could bend reality itself?

They ran through a hallway and around a corner. Despite its occupants, this structure was not badly corrupted, yet, with no more filth than usual among its cracked windows and sagging ceilings and the occasional drop into dusty, tenebrous space. It was much like the wrecked hab-block the Gods' Favoured used, though it smelled worse.

Fifth Squad turned another corner. Something bulky jumped out at Hotchkins, who had not shown the slightest caution, and it knocked her easily to the ground, while the guns of her command opened up in a spasm of noise and muzzle flashes. A few less scrupulous soldiers might have taken this chance to rid themselves of a commander they hated. Mrita just charged into melee, ready and eager to kill.

She made out a beast the size of an ogryn, probably several hundred kilos of fat, quaking flesh. Two heads sprouted from between its shoulders—one lean and clear-cut, like a wolf's, the other recessed into the torso with a round, tooth-lined mouth just barely protruding—and it stood atop some uncountable number of legs. Teeth and eyes and claws appeared and disappeared as she watched; this was a creature of change as much as decay. It bit into Sergeant Hotchins' armor, eliciting a scream, then turned what passed for its face towards Mrita.

She raised her chainsword. Lasbolts and bullets streaked around her, blasting out patches of filth from the creature, but it hardly seemed to be bothered—she may have gotten in over her head with this one. Nevertheless, she stood her ground as it bounded forward on its many feet. She let out a warcry.

On the approach she sliced off two of its limbs, and with a backswing carved a gash through its body. The consistency of its flesh was rubbery, bogging down the blade. She screamed louder and pushed with all her strength, and then her weapon was free again, growling in the air as if demanding more blood to sate its thirst.

The beast healed before her eyes. The cut through its torso stitched itself back together, and the two limbs she'd severed sprouted again from their stumps.

Yes. Mrita had definitely gotten in over her head.

It lashed out at her with its wolflike snout, snapping a pair of jaws lined with jagged teeth, and the second mouth spat a glob of greenish fluid that splashed against her armor and hissed slightly. Some spilled through her elbow joint, burning the skin below. She screamed again.

"Bastard!" Mrita cursed, swinging her chainsword to fend off a bite from this creature. She didn't have a clue what it was. Daemon? Mutant? Champion of Nurgle? More concerning was the fact that she also didn't know how to kill it. Perhaps she had to decapitate it, or perhaps she had to wear it down with more cuts and slashes.

A blow from the side, by a tentacle she hadn't seen coming, knocked her to the ground and the chainsword out of her hand. In another second it would bear down and tear her apart.

Before the Nurgle-thing could do that, though, it caught fire—lashing orange flames sprouted from its many eye sockets and spread from there. A paradoxical chill swept through the air at the same time. This was… more sorcery, it had to be. She turned and saw the squad's psyker, arms outstretched, visibly straining to channel the warp's power. Blood trickled from his nose and his eyes glowed purple.

"Fire!" he shouted. "Its weakness is fire!"

The beast shrieked and retreated into the depths of the hab complex. Around it, flames lit the walls, until finally it disappeared from sight. Mrita sat for a moment, gathering her breath. Her acid-burned arm stung terribly. She had countless other aches and pains, besides, including her wounded hand, where the sutures had been ripped loose. It would take a miracle to avoid infection, now.

"You could have done that earlier," she said, as the sorcerer approached.

"It's not easy to manifest my powers." He wiped blood from his face. His eyes were bleeding, not just his nose. "And using them will kill me, one of these days. I almost lost control this time."  
Mrita got to her feet. Nearby, a few of the heretics were helping up Sergeant Hotchkins, who groaned in pain. Otherwise the building was silent. The Fellowship of Black Blood seemed to have withdrawn, for now.

"What's your name?"

"Berson. Yours?"

"Mrita Konvalos."

"You're a traitor guardsman." He gestured at her armor, dented and splattered and dissolved almost beyond recognition.

"Yeah. You?"

"A seeker of the truth, like you, persecuted and forsaken by the Imperium's slaves. Unlike you I am gifted with a direct link to the gods."

It was cowardice, she thought, fighting from a distance with fell Warp-magic, but he _had_ saved her life, and she wasn't blind to help.

"Which god?"

"I serve Chaos Undivided." Berson smiled. He was missing several teeth, the rest were rotting, his tongue was jet-black between them.

Mrita hoped she could at least keep her teeth.

"Chaos doesn't look undivided from here. My first battle with the Gods' Favoured, and I'm fighting fellow heretics."

"You misunderstand. Chaos has many aspects, forever clashing against each other, but they are all parts of the same, fundamental force. The Word of Lorgar teaches us this."

She raised an eyebrow. "The Word of Lorgar?"

"Oh, my friend. You have so much left to learn. See Azryl the Dark Prophet speak, just one time, and your eyes shall be opened."

She nodded, studying him. "Very well. I'll… remember that."

There were skittering and squelching sounds elsewhere in the building, just out of sight. She turned from Berson and readied her chainsword to face whatever would attack them next.

If the psyker was right—he might well be, he was experienced in the ways of Chaos—she and the Nurglite abominations served the same power, ultimately. They were two sides of the same coin. Pieces in a game of Regicide, played for the gods' strange amusement.

Then the next wave of horrors came charging from the shadows, spraying pus and black blood as they ran, and Mrita didn't care about anything except killing. She charged into the fray.


	8. Lorgar

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay, everyone! Here is the next installment of Mrita Konvalos' journey in the service of Chaos.

Mrita earned three days' rations, that afternoon, having fulfilled her sergeant's challenge for five enemy heads. Most came from corpses she'd killed, but two of them she stole, which was fair, because the grubby, greedy hands of her allies had taken so many of her own trophies. In the aftermath of a battle it was hard to prove who had killed what, and the result was a bitter scramble.

"There," she said, tossing the last head into her pile on the side of the street. "That's five. I killed others, but I don't want to touch any more than I have to."

Sergeant Hotchkins nodded. "You've earned your prize, Konvalos."

She handed her a bundle of ration packs. Mrita picked through them, finding only bread and substitute meat, but that was enough. She nodded back.

"Listen up!" Hotchkins said, walking up and down a line of dishevelled soldiers mostly under her command. There were a few strays from other squads, mixed in. The remains of the Gods' Favoured milled about around the ruined hab-block. "We got what we came for. Ammo, and batteries, and rations to last two weeks!"

Cheers greeted her. A Chaos warband, Mrita was learning, always existed on the edge of depletion and starvation. This supply cache they'd captured was a big deal.

"There's more good news," she went on. "Sir, if you will?" Beside her, Captain Gerathus—the leader of the Gods' Favoured, the man with too many teeth and a pauldron made of human skin—stepped out in front of his troops.

"Yes. Brothers and sisters in Chaos, we have received new orders: we are called by the Prophet of Pain himself to travel to Khoz Thul, and muster for our next great battle! We leave tomorrow!"

More good news, more cheers.

Mrita didn't know what or where Khoz Thul was. The name didn't sound inviting. She imagined it as the capital, after a fashion, of this heretic planet, where the great Azryl held court and dispensed the judgment of the gods.

* * *

They returned that night to their base camp, where the heretics rested and fought and Mrita washed herself off with water only marginally less filthy than she was. She felt healthy enough—no fever, no pox, no throbbing infection of her wounded hand. Perhaps she was resistant to the powers of Nurgle, for she had her own patron to protect her. Khorne would not let one of his followers go so easily.

From the equipment store—really just a pair of mouldering rooms containing whatever rubbish the Gods' Favoured had managed to pilfer—she requested, and received, more promethium for her chainsword, which had just about run dry. She smiled as she revved it up one more time; the mechanisms were still a little gummed up, but they ran, regardless.

There was an Imperial Aquila on one side of the hilt; she scratched it off with a knife, leaving the floor littered with flecks of gold. On the other side, then, was a curved plate of metal—the small promethium tank—and that she etched with the eight-pointed star, in all its angular glory. This weapon, like her, was bound to Chaos.

"Mrita." Berson crouched beside her, holding his indispensable tome. Now that she got a good look at the cover she saw that it was a flayed face. "You fought well today."

"Thank you."

"Hotchkins says you might be worth keeping around. This is good—not everyone who joins the Gods' Favoured is allowed to stay. But there are things you must learn before you move any further in our membership."

"Such as?"

"You have joined a church. Like any church, we have doctrines, and as a member you will be expected to know them." He tapped the leathery cover of his book. "The ways of the gods."

She looked him in the eyes, unhappy to be handed more than she had signed up for. It wasn't enough just to kill, apparently—she would have to worship with these people, too, and waste her time on their hymns and prayers.

"I am willing to teach you the Word of Lorgar," Berson went on, after she said nothing.

The screaming face on the cover of the book warned her to run fast and far from the horrors within, and yet…

"All right. Tell me about Khorne. My patron."

Berson smiled, and sat down. "As you wish. We shall start there."

He opened the book, turned several pages, revealed an illustration of a red, snarling, horned creature, sitting atop a skull throne amid a vortex of blood. Khorne.

* * *

The lesson dragged on long into the night. Berson was all too happy to preach, and Mrita could hardly get a word in edgewise.

There were four gods, two of which she had known already—Khorne and Nurgle—and two of which were new to her—Tzeentch and Slaanesh. Everything, good and evil, was encompassed by the Powers. Even when Mrita had soldiered bravely for the Imperium, she'd fed them with her thoughts and feelings. Slogging through mud and rain had bolstered Nurgle, the lord of endurance as well as plague, and scheming Tzeentch was there whenever she cheated at a game of cards. Slaanesh whispered when she relished the warmth of a fire or lusted after a comrade. Khorne, obviously, had collected every skull she split, but he had also fed on her valor, her honor, and her courage to fight against the odds.

It was as the Mordian sergeant had said: Chaos could not be defeated. Mankind's great enemy was its very own self.

"But who is Lorgar?" Mrita cut in, when Berson took a break to drink from a filthy canteen. "You people keep mentioning the Book of Lorgar and the Word of Lorgar."

Berson nodded. "Lorgar is our prophet. He is the Urizen, the chosen of the gods, enlightened in their ways so that he might bring the Word to fallen humanity."

"Is he a man? An Astartes? A daemon?" For all Mrita knew, this Lorgar could be some long-dead madman lucky enough to have gathered a following, or a being capable of rending worlds. The universe was vast and she was learning not to make assumptions.

"He is a Primarch. Like Horus, a son of the Emperor. Ten thousand years ago he and his own sons—the Seventeenth Legion, the Word Bearers—discovered the truth about Chaos, and sought to free humanity from the Emperor's shackles. To this day they are still trying."

"And how do we mortals fit into all this?"

"Lorgar calls for the faithful to join him, and we answer. Half the warbands on this planet follow his creed and obey his doctrines."

"The other half?"  
"Scoundrels and opportunists, serving Chaos for their own ends rather than its everlasting glory. The Fellowship of Black Blood were one such example. They venerated one god too far above the others, and in doing so, they violated the Word of Lorgar. As we speak their filthy souls are being consumed by the Powers."

Mrita pointed at the book. "And that, there, is the Word of Lorgar?"

He shook his head and closed the volume. With one hand he lovingly stroked the splayed flesh on the cover, as one might stroke a pet. "This here is not the Word. The Word has twelve thousand volumes. What I have is… a summary, of sorts."

"I understand."

"No, Mrita, there is very little you understand—the wisest of scholars spend lifetimes prying open the secrets of Chaos, and they only just begin to see the Truth."

He opened the book again. Serried ranks of glyphs confronted her, burned into her eyes, and the lesson continued.

* * *

They broke camp the following morning, leaving behind nonessential gear and a few wounded. Mrita, who could walk and swing a chainsword, and hadn't yet succumbed to any gifts of Nurgle from her last encounter, was not among those abandoned, yet still she felt a pang of guilt for those wretched souls. They would die of thirst or starvation at best, fall prey to another warband at worst.

One man, rotting steadily away from one of the Brotherhood's diseases, asked to be put out of his misery; while some of the other heretics mocked his pain, Mrita obliged and decapitated him. Khorne cared not from where the blood flowed. Even acts of mercy served him, sometimes.

The Gods' Favoured were on the road by mid-morning, marching in a rabble of a hundred or so, singing praises to the Ruinous Powers that could be heard for kilometers around. If anybody else in this city were itching for a fight, they would know where to find it.

As it happened, nobody attacked, and in fact they did not encounter a single soul.

One day's marching took them out of the city, two days' into the ruined fields further south, Here, as everywhere, the artifacts of war dotted the landscape, with deserted trenches running in long parallel lines, months-old bodies rotting at the bottom of every crater, coils of barbed wire rusting above the dirt. Still, nobody.

After three days Mrita noticed that the world around her was beginning to change. Beyond a scattering of clouds, a violet sheen clung to the sky, tinting it like some vast stained-glass window.

"Berson," she spoke up, as the company crossed the tottering remains of a bridge. A barricade sat at one end of it, with attendant bodies in various states of dismemberment, and along its length ran Gothic balustrades that were now shattered to pieces.

"Yes?" He had been conversing with another heretic, a private named Gurnim.

"Why is the sky turning purple?"

Berson looked up, and nodded as if it were only the most natural thing.

"What you see is Warp energy, enveloping the planet."

"But… why?"

"It's Azryl's plan. It will grow until it breaks down the barrier between reality and unreality, facts and feelings, the Warp and the material realm."

"Praise the four," Gurnim said reverently, gazing up at the violet sky.

"Since the very start of the rebellion here, Mrita, we have worked to carry out rituals, bringing forth the Warp's power through blood sacrifice."

Perhaps that had been the true purpose of the great and horrific corpse-sculpture she had seen back in the city—to draw the blessing of the Powers, in the most brutal way possible. Murder and torment so frenzied that the universe itself felt the pain.

"Azryl is a talented psyker," Berson went on, "with many more psykers in his service. My friend and I, as scholars, have spoken with some of them and learned of their plans, but this is not common knowledge."

Of course not. Whether anybody would survive the ritual was an open question, and most of the people here—discounting the fanatics—looked out for themselves.

"Then why are you letting me in on the secret?"

"Because in about eighteen hours, we shall be at Khoz Thul, and within a day the merging of worlds shall be complete. There is no reversing what has been started, now."

"And who will survive?"

"The faithful." Berson held up his book. The face on the cover seemed to have a different expression now—it, too, looked at the sky. "Have no fear, Mrita. If you have absorbed the lessons I've taught you, you are in the camp of the saints."

* * *

They reached Khoz Thul in another twenty-one hours. The delay came first from a river crossing, made harder by the lack of any decent bridges, and second from a pocket of guardsmen who had somehow survived this whole time.

"For the Emperor!" they had cried, launching their doomed ambush from a line of trees above the road. Poor, loyal fools they were. Like Enthilde. There couldn't have been more than twenty of them, against a hundred of the Gods' Favoured, and scarcely had they started their bayonet charge—they were about out of ammunition, it seemed—before they were cut down with bullets and lasbeams.

Mrita only got at one of them, a malnourished Valhallan private lucky enough to reach melee range. She bisected him with her chainsword, effortlessly dodging his strike, and she relished the chance to spill blood that was a good, wholesome red, not filthy black. Both halves of him twitched on the ground.

That was the battle, over in twenty seconds. After killing the Vallhallan she raised her snarling chainsword, bellowed in fury in the direction of the slain, but there was nobody left there to hear her. Disappointing.

For the rest of the march she'd thought often about that brave, doomed suicide charge—it was pathetic, how they'd thrown away their lives in a battle they knew they couldn't win, for a god that couldn't hear them; she told herself she was _glad_ she was no longer one of those doomed idiots, like Enthilde—and then, before she knew it, she arrived at Khoz Thul. A field of ten thousand impaled corpses stared back at her.

They were arranged in a ring, some dozens thick, around a circular recess that had been cut out of the ground. Blood ran down the stakes and glistened in the afternoon sun.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" Berson said, walking beside her. "Their suffering has made this ground holy. The Powers' eye is drawn here, to the greatest shrine upon this world."

So this was Khoz Thul—not a city, but a monument, put up by Azryl's armies for the glory of the Ruinous Powers.

"Move it!" Sergeant Hotchkins said, taking her rifle and striking the slowest members of the squad, Berson included. She refrained from hitting Mrita. "We are to muster in the center, before the Dark Saint, and we _will_ look presentable!"

The Gods' Favoured and Second Squad walked along a path through the forest of corpses. The stench was terrible, reminding Mrita all too much of the Brotherhood, though Nurgle probably played no more of a part than usual in the decay and rot of these bodies.

Those bodies lucky enough to be dead, that was. Some of the impaled squirmed and moaned. It was pointless cruelty, and Mrita averted her gaze.

In the center of the ring, a great circular plaza had been laid out, paved with fragments of bone. It must have measured almost a kilometer from side to side; atop its vast expanse stood tens of thousands of heretics, mortals and terrible hulking Astartes, traitor guardsmen like her and things far beyond human—it was a dizzying menagerie of evil.

And in the center of the circle, a man stood alone atop a wide black tower.

Azryl.

He was tall, gaunt, with thin strands of grey hair. He dressed simply, with black robes and a bronze skull as a clasp on one shoulder, and on his forehead was the mark of the Ruinous Powers.

"Praise be to the Prophet of Pain," Gurnim said.

Berson nodded and pointed, nudging Mrita. "That there is a man closer to the Powers than any of us will ever be. The sons of Lorgar have gifted him with the Truth, and through him inspired us all to throw off the shackles of the rotting Imperium. And look—there are the sons of Lorgar."

He pointed again. Two heretic Astartes stood by the base of the tower, wearing blood-red armor studded with spikes. Emblems of screaming daemonic faces adorned their shoulder pauldrons. For now, they waited, like all the rest of this titanic assemblage.

They were waiting for the last troops to arrive. The parade ground was not full, and people still trickled in from outside. There was no hope of organizing them into the neat rows and columns any Imperial rally would have had—this was Chaos, after all, and disparate units clumped together according to their own kinds, the gaps between them shrinking as more entered. All faced Azryl, eager to hear him deliver the gods' wisdom.

Minutes passed. There were murmurs. The influx of heretic soldiers slowed to a trickle. Then:

"Brothers and sisters in Chaos!" Azryl called out, his voice deeper than Mrita had expected, underscored by still deeper rumblings from some far-off plane. The words carried all the way across the plaza without any visible means of amplification. "Our war here is won, and this world belongs to us! We have claimed it in the name of the Gods of the Warp!"

Thousands of heretics raised their fists and their weapons, and cheered. "Praise the Four! Praise the Four!"

Mrita, for her part, did not join in. She just leaned on her chainsword, the tip of its blade planted in the crushed bone of the plaza, and watched the jubilant army she was increasingly coming to despise. There was no honor in skewering tens of thousands of civilians for one's own sick amusement. There was no glory in using their suffering to channel dark sorceries. Berson had taught her the ways of this new faith, but Mrita was not yet willing to accept them.

Azryl went on: "For you, my devoted followers, I bear the Word of Lorgar—the great encapsulation of the universal Truth. It is power for those who heed it, destruction everlasting for those who do not. Nothing of value exists that our prophet Lorgar has not captured in writing. He scorns the ways of men, and exalts the ways of the gods!"

"Praise the Four!"

Berson shot a sidelong glance at Mrita.

"Praise the Four!" This time, she joined in.

Up on the tower, Azryl conjured a book out of thin air. All he had to do was wave his hand and then the tome was floating in front of him, its covers splayed open, pale red light emanating from its pages. When he read his voice was not that of a mortal man, but of daemons. Mrita's ears ached and she felt blood drip from her nose.

"Blessed is he who surrenders his will to the gods, for his are the domains of life, of knowledge, of joy, of victory, forever and always, granted as divine reward! Blessed are those who endure the tribulations of this existence in service to the glory to come. For at the end of all things, Chaos will reign, and all who look upon its wonders shall weep with joy.' _This_ is what our prophet says! _This_ is the Primordial Truth!"

He closed the book, and grinned. People all the way at the back of the audience would be able to see that smile. Overhead, the purple sky squirmed in delight.

"It won't be long, now, before this world is merged gloriously with the Warp, and the faithful among us achieve our apotheosis," Azryl continued. He paused, and dismissed the book with a snap of his fingers. It disintegrated into curls of smoke. Beside and beneath him, one of the Word Bearers clambered up the steps to the tower. "I have a guest who would like to speak with you, as the hour draws near. He is of the old guard. An Astartes of the First Founding. For ten thousand years he has fought against the armies of the Corpse-Emperor, slaying their finest warriors, laying low their pathetic temples! His name is Zorus Tal, and he is a son of Lorgar!"

Zorus Tal dwarfed the mortal Azryl. For a moment, Mrita wondered if the tower's obsidian and bone construction would crumble beneath his weight, but it stood firm.

"Praise be to you faithful, who have come so far to stand before the Prophet of Pain," the Word Bearer said. "This is truly a glorious assembly. So much martial power, displayed for the galaxy to see, and for the corpse-worshipers to fear. It reminds me of another muster for war, long before any of your times. At a place called Calth."

Calth. Mrita had never heard of it. This galaxy was vast, and she had only ever been to two planets, Pirea and this miserable backwater.

"The gods have had suffering aplenty to serve their thirst. For that work, I praise you. But, that is not enough—there is one final ingredient they need, before this planet can be brought into the Warp's embrace. One more sacrifice."

Mrita heard rustling and clattering not far away. A nearby heretic platoon had fixed bayonets and slammed fresh magazines into their autoguns. Several other units—a quarter of the assembled army, perhaps—separated slightly from the rest and readied their weapons.

"Shit," she breathed.

"What is it, Mrita?" Berson asked.

"Look around you. _We're_ the sacrifice."

While he should have known better, and seen what was going on around them, he stared at her as if she had gone mad.

"You who have fought so hard, and have so loyally come here today," the Word Bearer went on, "you are blessed in the eyes of the Powers. But remember that your mortal lives matter not against their grand designs."

She needed a ranged weapon; a chainsword alone wouldn't do against the volleys that were about to open up. One of the soldiers beside Mrita, someone she still didn't know, happened to have a laspistol.

"Each of us is but a candle in the cathedral that is our universe. Our experiences, our pain, form a flickering glow that lights the house of the gods."

She shoved him to the ground, kicked him, and took it, because her survival was more important than his.

"The gods have drunk much of pain and wrath during this war; now, thanks to your sacrifice, they shall drink the sweet nectar of betrayal."

The man struggled; Mrita put a boot on his windpipe and crushed the life from him, even as she took aim elsewhere with the laspistol.

"What in the Warp are you doing, Konv—" Hotchkins called out. She didn't get to finish. A heretic ten meters away riddled her with bullets, as the entire field disintegrated at once into a massacre. Gunshots and las-cracks rang out, and there were screams, and the hosts of Azryl fell by the thousands.

Mrita ran. A heretic with a bolt pistol took aim at her, amid the chaos, but he was too slow; she leveled her laspistol and blasted out the back of his skull. Another man she gutted with a growling swipe of her chainsword, though when she turned to take a look she saw he was one of the Gods' Favoured. It was not at all easy to discern friend from foe here.

A shell detonated, knocking the breath from her lungs and sending a hail of gore through the air. Someone had artillery trained on Khoz Thul. Apparently Azryl and the Word Bearers did not particularly care which of their acolytes lived and died.

Berson, to her surprise, was still standing, defending himself from the onslaught with bolts of psychic power fired nearly at random into the crowd. He was beset by a trio of hulking traitor ogryn, who rushed towards him with glaives and swords. Mrita, after hesitating for the merest fraction of a second, decided to intervene—Berson was the closest thing she had to an ally, and, indispensably, he knew what fell powers they were dealing with here.

So she charged and took the legs out from under the lead ogryn. She wasn't tall enough to hit much higher.

"Blood for the Blood God!" she shouted. This was her prayer, and war was her temple.

Another ogryn turned from Berson and tried to strike her with a glaive, but the blow was sluggish, and she evaded—she danced around the blade and put a point-blank laspistol shot beneath his chin.

"Skulls for the Skull Throne!"

The last of the three swung towards Berson with his sword. She chopped his arm off, then dug her chainswords straight into his gut, spraying herself with blood and entrails in the process. He collapsed ponderously to the ground.

Now she had a moment in which she wasn't being stabbed or shot at. Confused battle raged around her, and the sky was a livid purple now, twisting and pulsing, fed by this latest sacrifice of blood. She turned to Berson.

"We have to get out of here."

"Yes." The psyker was distant for a moment, then refocused. "I shall try to clear the way. You must cover me."

Someone fired a las-bolt at them, and missed. Mrita hit the shooter square in the chest. Yes, it was good to have a ranged weapon again.

"Mrita!" Berson said. "Look!"

"What?"

He pointed, and Mrita looked. Around the plaza, in the forest of the impaled, dead and dying alike began to move—twitching, then convulsing, then slithering together into masses of flesh.

The sacrifice was complete. The Warp was here.


	9. Realm of Chaos

Author's Note: Guess who's back? After two months, the next chapter is finally out. Enjoy!

Daemons appeared from nowhere, among the crowd, their forms as varied as the traitors themselves—some had crimson skin, and horns, and wickedly serrated blades; some were blue and pink masses of tentacles, spewing psychic fire; some, too, were one-eyed pestilent monsters, and others were androgynous, crab-clawed, frighteningly beautiful creatures that swirled in a bloody dance it hurt to look away from. They killed indiscriminately, shrieking with joy as they cut through armor and limbs. The armies of the gods were afoot on the ground of Khoz Thul.

Mrita stuck close to Berson as they ran through the melee, leaving behind the shattered and quickly dying remnants of the Gods' Favoured. Captain Gerathus was decapitated by a lasgun shot through the neck; almost everyone else succumbed to other heretics' blades as the killing frenzy went on. Mrita looked back one last time, and then she and the psyker were alone, soldiers of no unit.

"Mrita! To your left!" Berson shouted.

To her left was a charging heretic in Guard flak armor, who could have been a Pirean just like her—it was hard to tell, with her unit markings obscured beneath spikes and black paint. The woman held a lasgun by the barrel. An iron Chaos star was affixed to the stock, turning it into a makeshift crozius, a symbol of devotion with which to bludgeon her foes.

Mrita parried the first swing, which otherwise would have crushed her skull. Chainsword teeth bit into the lasgun. It reminded her of her duel against Commissar Vant, and she smiled—that fight had been good and honorable. No guns or psychic tricks. No daemons pouring through holes in reality.

"The gods have decreed your destruction!" said her attacker.

Mrita didn't care what the gods decreed. She fended off another blow, chipping several points from the Chaos star. One swift swing knocked the other heretic's weapon off to the side, giving Mrita a clear shot at her torso, and she thrust the chainsword through. Blood splattered on her and pieces of ribcage bounced off her armor. Mrita let the corpse drop to the ground, lifeless, and sought out her next opponent.

Escape could wait. There were still people to kill. She fought, and the chainsword droned on and on, only changing pitch when it sliced through flesh. With her other hand she fired off shots with the laspistol; these, too, scored kills, though the experience couldn't compare with the glorious savagery of melee.

She decapitated a man, a squadmate of the woman she'd just slain. His blood ran hot across her hands and face. Next she struck down two people who were already writhing and contorting with strange Warp energies. Their blood, when it flowed, glowed purple. Khorne would still take it.

"Dammit, Mrita!" Berson said, emerging seemingly from nowhere to grab her by the arm. He pointed at the daemons multiplying across the parade ground, and further at the wall of impaled flesh that was growing thicker and thicker. "We were trying to get out of here!"

She almost swung the chainsword around to kill him, only deflecting the blow at the last instant. The whirring blade passed within a centimeter of his skull. He flinched but maintained his grip.

"Right." Her bloodlust faded for a moment. She understood the peril of the situation.

"Now, this way!" He raised his hands, and there was a sound like crinkling paper, and ten bodies exploded in front of him, clearing a path to the boundary of the bone-paved plaza. It was foul sorcery, but Mrita wasn't complaining just now.

In front of her the ring of impaled corpses was all but gone, replaced by a wall of quivering, shrieking flesh—something had used the bodies as entry points and then grown from there. The gaps between them were swiftly diminishing. A hundred gaping, screaming mouths devoured those who got too close, while escaping heretics ran towards the few openings left, seeking refuge from the daemons and traitors pursuing them.

Mrita and Berson made for the nearest passage. At once a daemon reared up in front of it, tall and bat-winged, and with a spiked mace it smashed a whole squad into pulp; so much for that route. Another gap in the flesh-wall looked harmless by comparison, and that was where they headed.

Other heretics ran beside her, but there seemed focused only on their own survival, and Mrita picked no fights with them—except when one man stopped, terrified, and stood in her way, at which point she shot him in the back with her laspistol. She had no patience for obstructions.

Into the gap she went. It was dark, and damp, like the gullet of some vast beast, and screaming, razor-toothed mouths grew from the walls. These swallowed some unlucky renegades, tore them apart even as those people cried out in agony and reached desperately for help. A few she decapitated, for mercy's sake, though she never stopped running.

Pale flesh squelched beneath her boots. There were hairs, eyes, noses scattered across its surface, alongside the gaping, ravenous mouths. Arms reached out and tried to grab her, though she fended them off.

The passage closed up into a tunnel, which branched several times into smaller tunnels, and before long she'd lost any sense of direction. This was a maze, utterly impenetrable. She looked back and there was no sign of Berson, or of anyone else. The only light was a dim glow from somewhere far away.

"Help me, Khorne," she prayed. But words were not enough for this god; she thrust the chainsword into the wall, cut through flesh, sprayed blood across the width of the corridor. Hopefully that would get his attention. "Help me!"

Nothing. She was beneath his notice. She kept running, and the passage shrank around her. In frustration she slashed at the walls again. Blood and ichor were hot on her skin. The tunnel continued to constrict, more maws and arms appearing from ever-mutating flesh. Teeth and claws and fingernails scraped against her armor.

Mrita would not die here, in this monster welded together from thousands of bodies. She would not meet her end in the wet, hungry darkness. Even if the gods willed her death, she didn't.

So, with her chainsword whirring, biting savagely into every surface it met, she trudged forward. A muscled arm reached out and tried to strangle her, and she cut it off. A mouth opened up beside her, almost swallowed her whole, but she fired a lasbolt through the back of its throat, and it released her with an agonized screech.

For what seemed like an age Mrita journeyed in the dark, fighting for her life. Finally light appeared up ahead, pale and pinkish, and she saw that there was only a thin membrane between her and the outside. It was stretched across the width of the tunnel. Blurry shapes lurked beyond it, moving frantically—dancing, almost. She caught the impression of horns and waving tentacles. Doubtless there was some greater horror lying in wait for her, but she was sick of this flesh-labyrinth, and she would take the chance.

She cut through. Light spilled in. She charged ahead, tried to ignore the feeling of the membrane as it brushed against her face, and then she was free—and there were no daemons waiting for her.

Mrita was in a wasteland. It reminded her of Therakos, the cold, rocky expanse on otherwise clement Pirea where the Eighth—including her and Enthilde—had hunted Tyranids, briefly, before heading off to the war against Azryl's heretics.

She took a longer look. Yes, it very much resembled Therakos.

The sky was clear and red with the setting sun. Titanic grey hills rolled across half the horizon, while on the other half a rocky plain stretched far into the distance, and pools of water pockmarked the landscape, glittering like silver in their small hollows. There was no sign of the abomination she'd just carved her way out of. No writhing mass of flesh. There was, however, another person—a solitary figure standing in the distance, holding a lasgun.

It was Enthilde. Short, dark-haired, clad in flak armor, with a wide, noble face recognizable anywhere. Mrita blinked, and she was right in front of her.

Her former friend still had the bayonet wound beneath her chin. Blood dripped from it, and rolled off the rocks by her feet.

"Regret anything?" Enthilde's voice was a rasp.

"No." Mrita backed away, and this specter followed her. "No, I don't think I do."

This was a Warp-spawned hallucination, or a disguised daemon, or some other sorcerous image. A being from beyond reality was standing in front of her and pretending to be a woman she'd murdered. Mrita owed it no sympathy.

"You did me a favor, you know," Enthilde said. "Your fellow heretics are a sadistic lot, but you gave me a quick death."

Mrita remembered the look on her friend's face when she'd skewered her. Terrified eyes, in horrific pain. "Yeah. I know."

"You made me a martyr. Now I sit beside the Emperor. Boundless is His love, for those who are loyal to Him alone, and when I went before the Golden Throne I was welcomed as a hero. Where are _you_ going, when you die?"

"Your Emperor is a corpse."

"You never had faith, Mrita. Now the gods of the Warp own your soul, forever, and there is no escape. The Emperor will not take you back. _I _will not take you back."

"Then stop talking to me, already."

Mrita turned and walked away, only for Enthilde to reappear directly ahead. This illusion would not be escaped so easily.

"You're not real," Mrita said. Enthilde stared back at her, still bleeding. "You're not real!"

"What's real, and what isn't? You've chosen the path of madness, where you can never know for sure."

Enthilde stepped closer. There was an alien aspect to her eyes, now, an impression of something very large looking through a mask. Mrita revved up the chainsword.

"I've chosen the path of glory."

"Glory? Really?" Enthilde snorted. "You'll die unmourned on a battlefield somewhere, and your new gods will laugh."

"Enough!" She swung the blade through Enthilde's neck. To her surprise, the blow connected, and cut her head from her shoulders. Her body collapsed. The blood was hardly visible against the dark rocks.

Now, Mrita was alone. A cold breeze blew from the hills, and she shivered as she stood there, watching Enthilde's corpse. Part of her expected it to stand up again.

After a short while, there was a rumbling in the distance. Mrita looked up and saw a convoy of vehicles approaching. They were tanks, Leman Russes bedecked with markings of the Eighth Pireans, and guardsmen rode on top of them.

She remembered this. Three months before the Eighth set off from Pirea, it had patrolled out in remote Therakos, hunting down the last stubborn remnants of the Tyranid invasion from a year earlier. There had been very little combat and much more sitting on the roof of a tank, watching the wasteland crawl past.

Mrita hid behind a boulder as the convoy drew nearer. There was a shallow rocky slope to her left, nearer to the tanks, and to her right was a shining pool of water, crisscrossed by ripples when she accidentally dipped her foot in it. Nobody aboard the tanks seemed to notice her or the ripples. They just glanced around, half of them bored out of their skulls, the other half chatting cheerfully amongst themselves.

On the second Leman Russ she spotted two very familiar faces: hers, and Enthilde's. They sat together atop the turret, their feet dangling. The tanks were quite close, now, and Mrita could hear her own voice yelling over the racket of the engines.

"There's a trick to fighting Hormagaunts, you see. If you target one on the side of the head, near the back, you can hit its nerve stem and put it down for good. One shot!" Past Mrita mimed a finger gun, pointed at her own temple. She'd been the more experienced one against the Tyranid threat; unlike Enthilde, she had seen a full campaign's worth of combat, not just one battle.

"But Tyranids generally charge straight at you." Enthilde asked, smiling. "How do you get to aim at the side?"

"_That_ is left as an exercise for the reader."

They shared a laugh. Present Mrita was envious. It had been a simpler, happier time, when there was nothing more sinister in the universe than the Tyranid horde. If only she had known...

"All right, we'll camp here!" called out Lieutenant Gorivan, riding the first tank. All four of them rolled to a halt just a few meters from where Mrita hid. The guardsmen dismounted, set up a quick perimeter, scanned the quickly darkening landscape for the creatures lurking out there. Past Mrita and Enthilde loitered by the second tank, and kept talking.

"So you've explained Hormogaunts. How about Termagants?"

"They're very similar. Main difference is, they use biological guns instead of claws, fighting at a distance. The nerve stem weakness still applies."

As present Mrita listened, a hot, pinching pain emerged in her back, and she cried out. Her past self glanced up at her but did not otherwise react.

They made eye contact for a long second. She saw Private Mrita Konvalos, of the Eighth Pireans—the woman she'd once been. She was staring ahead, and Mrita could not help but notice how _clean_ she looked: her uniform was brand new, save for a light dusting of roadside grime, and her red hair was bound neatly in a ponytail. Her face was unblemished, her cheeks plump. In the Guard she had once known comfort, and safety, at least by comparison with her new life.

The pain in her back grew worse. Something was pushing its way out from between her shoulders. She could feel it growing by the second, like a hyper-accelerated tumor, and then it broke the skin, and she screamed.

Mrita looked into the pool beside her, wondering what horror had just sprouted from her own body. In the reflection she saw her answer.

Red, membranous wings extended from her shoulder blades. She unfurled them, marveled at them, watched how the bones and skin moved. They dripped blood, and were quite sore.

As for the woman between the wings, she was a tired, twisted creature, spattered with blood. She was a freak. A mutant, now, corrupted by the gods. Mrita took a good, long look at herself, folded her wings, and wept.

* * *

"Mrita!"

Berson's voice.

She opened her eyes to find herself back in the flesh-tunnel. The fresh air of Therakos was gone, replaced by stench that hit her like a wall. Berson stood next to her, smiling, revealing his brown, corroded teeth and black tongue, and she raised her chainsword and pistol.

"Where in the gods' name did you come from?" she asked.

"What are you talking about? I was following you this whole time."

"I was alone."

"We were running together through the tunnel, then you froze up for a second. And..." He pointed at her. Mrita looked over her shoulder, and saw that she still had the wings, red and wet and batlike. "It looks like you have received a gift from the gods."


	10. Daemon World

Mrita was silent for a long moment. Her wings twitched behind her, the nerves in them still connecting and sorting themselves out.

"Why?" she asked. "Why me?"

"The Powers are fickle, Mrita." Berson motioned for them to get moving, and they passed with squelching footfalls down the length of the corridor. "But it is not our place as mortals to question their whims. Now, hurry! Who knows how much longer this passage will be open?"

Screams echoed from behind her; elsewhere, heretics like herself, fleeing the slaughter at Khoz Thul, were being tormented and devoured. It would not be long before she suffered the same fate.

The passage wound ahead for some distance, knowing no logic or reason. Twice, she and Berson ran into dead ends; three times, their route curved back onto itself. She had been running for half an hour and still she had not escaped the flesh-labyrinth. She imagined it taking up a vast swath of the landscape, perhaps the whole planet.

At last, however, they reached the end. The passage broadened and opened into the night. That was strange; it had been late afternoon last time she'd checked.

"We're standing on a daemon world, now," Berson said, when she brought it up. "Time doesn't flow the way you're used to."

They walked out onto what had once been farmland, though the fields were now quite thoroughly dead. Beneath their feet, skin gave way to soil, and the stench of meat finally dissipated as a cool breeze blew towards them.

"We're out," Mrita said, stretching her wings. They caught the breeze, pulled her back a little bit—it was a strange sensation. "Where to, now?"

"Now, we have to hide."

She nodded, and crouched. The closest cover was some meters away, a grove of blasted trees next to a burnt-out agricultural combine. Beyond that a hedge would shield them, at least from one side, and at its terminus lay the ruins of a small warehouse.

She led Berson towards the trees. Something flew by overhead, screaming. It left behind a trail of countless shimmering colors—red, green, purple, others she couldn't identify—-and the creature's piercing shriek reverberated in her bones. Her ears ached.

"Get down!" Berson shouted.

Mrita collapsed to the ground and rolled into a nearby irrigation ditch. Mud soaked through the tattered, grimy remnants of her uniform, and she cursed.

"What in the Warp is that?" she asked Berson, who lay prone beside her and looked warily upwards.

"A Screamer of Tzeentch. One of his most dangerous daemons."

More than one chromatic trail stretched across the black starless sky; there was a pack of these creatures on the loose, hunting for the weak and vulnerable.

"I can't stand that sound."

"No one can. Now remain very still, and hopefully they'll find prey elsewhere before they notice us."

She spotted one of the Screamers, though it was no more than a silhouette, and discerned a body like a stingray, wide and pointed on either end. Its horrid screech continued unabated; she cringed, shrinking away from the noise.

Someone opened up with an autogun, maybe twenty meters distant. She couldn't see the person, but Mrita imagined a lone heretic, panicking at the sight of things beyond his understanding and lashing out in the only way he could. It was a futile gesture, not much more effective than Mrita trying to leap up and swat the daemons with her chainsword. It did, however, draw their attention—the pack dived out of the sky, swooping with terrible speed at their hidden foe, and an all-too-human shriek emerged above their screams.

"This is our chance!" Berson said, quietly. "Run!"

They made for the grove of trees and the burnt-out combine. Mrita crouched low as she ran, her wings folded, all too aware that—as much as she wanted to—she couldn't fight this enemy. The only option was to hide, like a coward.

There was just a ten-meter sprint across open ground and then they were behind cover. The trees were short, only a couple meters taller than she was, and their trunks were thin, but it was better than nothing. No leaves decorated their branches. Last she'd checked, it was winter, but seasons didn't mean much anymore.

On to the hedge. She glanced towards the Screamers, saw them circling around the location of the poor fool with the autogun. Blood dripped from the mouth of the lead daemon, who had gotten to the kill first, while the others were on the lookout for their own meals.

The hedge ran in a straight line for some distance, and she was able to hide most of herself behind it. Berson had an easier time—he didn't have wings to deal with. She had to take care not to brush against the branches and rustle the leaves.

A Screamer of Tzeentch swooped directly overhead, its screech alone enough to force her to the ground. She panicked, expected the next few moments to bring a maw of razor-sharp teeth, but the scream receded into the distance—it hadn't spotted her, yet. She got back up, and continued to run.

Before long, something else drew the Screamers' attention, and they were off, speeding towards their next prey. Their glittering trails lingered long in the air behind them, bright enough to leave afterimages when Mrita closed her eyes.

From the hedge it was a short journey to the ruined warehouse. It was a structure of concrete and corrugated metal siding, largely collapsed, and on the near wall remained half the image of an Imperial Aquila, now defaced with Chaos stars and esoteric runes. It suited the Imperium, to emblazon its symbol on so mundane a building as a storehouse; it suited the forces of Chaos, also, to go out of their way to vandalize even a fragment of something the corpse-worshipers held sacred.

There was movement within the building. Several footfalls, treading on rubble. Mrita looked at Berson, and without a word passing between them, they decided to move on.

They made their way through another field, their only concealment the cover of night. Against daemons that was of dubious value. But at least the Screamers were gone, now, and in the darkness Mrita couldn't discern much besides scattered trees, derelict buildings, other remnants of the bucolic countryside this had once been. Behind her, the flesh-labyrinth was a sprawling and hideous shadow.

Somewhere in there was Azyrl, the Prophet of Pain, and she wondered for a moment how he planned to get out. Probably the gods would provide a way, for this servant who had delivered a whole world into their grasp. There would be no such generosity for Mrita. She was on her own, except for those fleeting moments when she drew the Blood God's attention.

She had to kill something again. She had to butcher her way back into Khorne's good graces, and then she would have a chance at survival.

The night dragged on. They marched. There were screams in the distance, every so often, and once or twice she thought she saw other figures, creeping through the blackness.

She wanted to fly, to feel the freedom of watching this ruined landscape pass beneath her. She knew she could; she had wings. But it would only have made her an obvious target, and besides, she wasn't ready just yet to leave her psychically gifted companion and strike out on her own.

"How are you doing on rations?" Berson asked, suddenly, as they clambered over a wide drainage pipe on the bank of a river. It was corroded by years of neglect, but sludge still dripped out the end.

"Not well. I have two slices of moldy bread and a tin of fruit. You?"

"One slice of bread." He led her up a muddy escarpment, where one false step could send either one of them tumbling into the river. "We will have to scavenge."

"Slim pickings around here."

"I don't know, meat should be easy to find."

Mrita grimaced. "You can't be suggesting…"

"Do you want to survive, or not?"

She didn't reply. She just trudged along through the countryside, completely silent, until a faint purple glow appeared on one end of the horizon.

Purple. Always purple. It was the Warp's color, she supposed, and now the color of this world's sky.

"We're going to have to find a hiding place soon," she said. "Unless you plan for us to march during the day?"

"Probably not. The land is flat around here, it would be hard to stay hidden."

"Then let's hide. We've been walking for hours." Her feet ached and her gear was heavy. Her skin was caked with blood and ichor, which she hadn't had a chance to wash off yet.

"Hours? Ha! This is hardly a stroll. You should know better than that, Mrita, you were with me on the march to Khoz Thul."

"Yes, but then we had roads. And food. And we weren't fleeing for our lives on a gods-damned daemon world."

"The gods do not favor weakness, least of all Khorne. We will keep going until dawn and then some."

"Fine. And where will we go?"

"Off-world. I hardly think we can stay here."

Mrita scoffed. There weren't a whole lot of starships around, only ruins, and daemons, and desperate people. "How exactly do you think we'll accomplish that?"

"The gods will provide."

"The gods just tried to kill us."

"It's as I said. They're fickle."

They trudged along through a region pockmarked with shell craters. Trenches crisscrossed the landscape. Corpses were everywhere, and luckily not all of them had been picked over. She came out with several tins of food and a working lighter. The flies were hard to deal with, though—she hated the flies. They swarmed around every corpse, fat-bodied creatures with bulbous eyes and coarse hairs, and as she fought her way through them she felt Nurgle's hand at work.

Shelter was easy to come by. There was no shortage of bunkers and dugouts here, amid the detritus of war. Somewhat harder to find was safe shelter—in the first dugout they entered, a wide structure packed with rotting carcasses, a creature like a two-meter worm slithered from one corpse and nearly bit Mrita. She cut it in half, only for the halves to regroup and attack again. She left before she found out if it could survive being cut into quarters.

On a daemon world, she was learning, even the wildlife took bizarre and deadly forms.

Sunrise came. The sun was bright purple, the sky was a deeper shade, and twisting Warp energies writhed overhead. Nobody else was in sight, though she did hear faint, intermittent screams from somewhere in the distance.

"There's a tunnel complex here," Berson said, once they'd climbed past the front-line trenches on what had been the Imperial Guard side. He indicated a set of wooden steps leading down into a crudely excavated passage. "After you."

Mrita glared at him, but nevertheless she went in first. She had her chainsword raised and whirring. The steps creaked beneath her boots, the combination of dampness, exposure, and termites having rotted them from within, and one plank snapped in half entirely, almost sending her plunging into the tunnel.

She arrived at the bottom and saw that the purple sunlight only extended so far. Past maybe five meters in either direction, it was impossible to see anything. Departmento Munitorum boxes, emblazoned with Aquilas, were stacked on one side of the corridor, while on the other side was an alcove containing a map table and a shattered lamp.

"Looks safe enough," she called up. She fished out a Guard-issue flashlight from her equipment bag, and swung its faint, flickering glow around the tunnel. Nothing moved, save for flecks of dust caught in the beam, and the dripping of water from a burst pipe on the ceiling. "Come on down."

Berson clambered down the steps, skipping the one Mrita had broken. He looked around cautiously. "Let's hope nobody else has decided to set up shop here."

She inspected the crates. They'd already been looted, to her disappointment, and there was nothing in them but blank parchment, empty cans, other detritus of a command post.

"Look, Mrita." Berson pointed at the muddy floor. "Footprints."

"Shit." She swung the flashlight beam around again, probing the darkness with an instrument that was certainly not up to the task. She caught glimpses of dirt walls, wooden beams, more crates, but she could see nothing in its entirety.

She also caught a glimpse of tattered clothing, and a face. Then a red lasbolt flashed down the length of the tunnel. It punched through her left wing, leaving a ragged, scorched hole in the skin, and she screamed. She raised her pistol and fired a burst of shots blindly in retaliation. Berson sent a bolt of crackling psychic energy into the darkness, and the combination of their efforts seemed to force the enemy to keep their heads down, for a bit.

"How many of them did you see?" he asked, as they both took refuge behind the stacked Munitorum crates.

"Just one. But I might be wrong."

Two lasbolts streaked past, followed by a third a split-second later.

"You were wrong."

She leaned around the corner and fired another couple of shots. Red light bounced off the walls of the tunnel, and somewhere downrange a woman screamed.

"I need to close the distance," Mrita said. Shooting half-seen enemies just wouldn't cut it, and now that she was fighting again she ached for the taste of blood, of power over those who would see her dead. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. She was ready to swing her chainsword again and kill.

"Go!" Berson told her. "I'll blind them for a bit."

He reached out, and a burst of eye-searing light flared from his palm, paired with a noise like a thunderclap. Mrita ran out into the line of fire. Her ears rang and a green afterimage clouded her vision, but her foes, facing Berson, would have had it worse.

She ran towards a cluster of men and women in ragged civilian garb. One slumped against the wall, a smoking hole blasted through her shoulder, and the others were staggering, blinded by the light. Three had laspistols and crude melee weapons, the fourth only carried a serrated glaive. They fired and missed as Mrita approached.

After only a few paces, she was among them, chainsword spinning. She cut one man's head from his shoulders. The injured woman she stabbed through the chest, the sword's teeth scrambling the inside of her ribcage, and with the pistol she shot another, point-blank, the red las-flash blasting chunks of meat from her shoulder. The smell of burnt meat and the sound of screams filled the air.

"Please!" begged the last man, with the glaive, casting aside his weapon. Mrita pitied him, but nevertheless raised her sword and prepared to deal the killing blow.

"Wait! Don't kill him!" Berson called out.

She ignored the psyker and swung downwards, only for her right arm to lock in place moments before the chainblade cut through the man's skull. She could not move it no matter how much effort she expended. Her laspistol, too, was useless—her left hand was similarly petrified.

"Berson!" she shouted, turning towards the psyker. Her arm remained exactly where it was. "Let me go, damn you!"

"We need to at least question him, Mrita."

"Let me go!"

Berson was visibly straining. A small line of blood trickled from his nose. He gestured for the prisoner to come closer, and the man ducked out from beneath Mrita's still-spinning chainsword to stand by him. Berson released her, finally.

"_Never_ do that again," Mrita said, flexing the arm Berson had seized up. She had half a mind to decapitate the filthy sorcerer then and there. He'd had the _gall_ to use his powers against her...

"Listen next time." Berson turned towards the prisoner. He was a ragged, filthy man, like so many of the heretics on this lost planet, and he had the flamelike mark of Tzeentch carved into his cheek. "Now I've gone through a lot of trouble to spare you, so you'd better cooperate. Tell us what we need to know and I promise to set you free."

"All right," said the heretic, eyeing Mrita. Evidently he didn't trust her to make good on the promise. "I have no quarrel with you people. You just dropped in here, and we defended ourselves."

"You wanted to kill us and loot our corpses, don't deny it. It's how you people survive."

"You would have tried to kill us first."

Berson shrugged. "Immaterial. Now, talk. How many other people are in this tunnel complex?"

"We were the only ones. The four of us."

"We'll see. Next question: Do you know of a way offworld?"

"What?"

"A way off this planet. I don't know if you've noticed, but the sky's purple now, and there are daemons everywhere. It's not a healthy place for us mortals. My friend and I would like to leave, as soon as possible."

"Don't be ridiculous. There's no leaving this world. We must learn to get by, or perish."

"Mrita." Berson glanced her way. She nodded, calmer now, and revved up her chainsword, holding the tip of it just beneath their captive's chin. Berson looked back towards the prisoner. "I suggest that you search your mind."

The man took a deep breath. "I think… there was one warband I ran into, earlier today. Said they were heading to join a muster for war."

"Whose war?"

"The Sons of Slaughter. They're Astartes, former World Eaters. They've issued a call for mortal warriors, and the people I talked to were going to join them."

Berson looked at Mrita. "They might be going off-world."

"I'd think so," she said. She lowered the chainsword, so that she didn't accidentally carve out the prisoner's throat. "And they're trying to recruit some cannon fodder before they leave."

"Where was this warband headed?"

"South," the prisoner said.

"More specifically."

"I don't know!"

"Mrita, cut off his arm."

"Norton's Spire!" the man cried out, moments before Mrita started hacking away at his shoulder. "One of them said they were headed to Norton's Spire!"

"Anything else?"

"No. Let me go, please."

"I think that's all he has for us," Berson said to Mrita. "Feel free to kill him now, if you'd like."

"We did promise him…" Mrita said, glancing at the prisoner. His eyes were wide, frightened, like a child's. It was a marvel he'd survived this long.

"You're trying to win the favor of the Blood God, and you can't do that by refusing to make offerings. It's in your best interests to kill him."

Mrita nodded. She swung her blade in a wide arc, and cut off the man's head before he could even begin to run. Blood gushed rhythmically from the ragged stump of his neck. She was still for a moment, watching the body, while red droplets continued to spray off her snarling chainsword.

"I take it you know where Norton's Spire is?" she asked, taking her thumb off the activation rune and letting the sword rest.

"Of course. It's a two-day journey from here." Berson crouched down and started picking through the other bodies. "I had a cousin who used to live over that way, before Azryl brought us all the enlightenment of Chaos. The city's rubble, now."

From a knapsack he removed several lho sticks, which he tossed aside, and a tin of meat, which he kept. Another corpse had two hard chunks of bread in its pockets. Altogether, it was looking like these people had been dirt-poor, unsurprisingly, and Mrita didn't bother to do any searching herself. She just leaned against the tunnel wall, her arms folded.

"Are we really going to try to join an Astartes warband, Berson? They'll consider us expendable. Cannon fodder."  
He didn't look up. "We need to get off this rock, and this is the only lead we have."

It was hard to argue with that logic. This planet was a tomb, suited only for daemons, corpses, and soon-to-be corpses, and she had no future here. Still… she'd fought against heretic Astartes before. She remembered their sheer scale, their raw aggression, the terror of going toe-to-toe with one in battle. They were giants who had been fighting the Imperium for ten thousand years, and to have such beings lording over her was not something she welcomed.


	11. Sons of Slaughter

Author's Note: Hello again! Y'all probably thought this was a deadfic-2019 was a miserable year, not good at all for my writing-but I'm back, and I intend to finish.

Welcome to Chapter XI.

Sergeant Mrita Konvalos stepped off the ramp of the Thunderhawk, and onto an Imperial world. Lasbeams greeted her. The enemy was prepared, no doubt—but so too were the Sons of Slaughter, and their mortal allies. Pain and carnage were in store for the defenders of Letas IV.

"After me!" she shouted to her squad, as she gestured with a chainsword at the corpse-worshipers' positions at the bottom of the hill. She ran forward, and ten heretics followed. They were a motley band; their armor was splashed with dried blood, their weapons ranged from lasguns to crowbars, and some of their bodies showed the gifts of Chaos at work, extra limbs and tentacles desecrating the human form.

Mrita, of course, had her wings, batlike and leathery. She spread them wide. Cold rain splashed across their surfaces as she ran, and, flapping them, she generated a modicum of lift, enough to lighten her steps on the muddy ground underfoot. Not enough to fly, with the weight of her chainsword.

A missile detonated nearby, spraying shrapnel that felled a few of the men and women under her command. Mrita herself was largely unharmed, though something thumped into her shoulder plate, and something else cut through the membrane of her left wing. It stung. Landing was the most dangerous part of these raids, as she was quickly finding out.

"Keep moving!" She fired off a few shots with her laspistol. In the darkness and rain it was impossible to see where they landed, but gods willing they hit someone.

Behind her, at the top of a shallow, grassy rise, four landed Thunderhawk transports spat troops at the enemy. About a dozen of the Sons of Slaughter were among them, the rest were mortals like Mrita. Cannon fodder. Their battle plan, to the extent that they had a battle plan, was to charge directly at the enemy and take their skulls—to Mrita's chagrin, her fellow devotees of Khorne were not sophisticated warriors.

Up ahead, makeshift defensive positions blazed with red light. Air cracked with ionization, and rain hissed as it was vaporized midflight. Heretics fell around her. The Imperials had rushed to their fortifications before the Sons of Slaughter landed, helped by the Astartes' decision to touch down in as obvious a place as the PDF garrison just outside town. If anybody had ever asked Mrita's opinion, the landing would have been in a field kilometers away, where they would've had an opportunity to regroup and march in formation, but nobody cared what she thought. The Astartes were ten-thousand-year-old supermen; they were probably looking for a challenge, a thrill to spice things up. Meanwhile, the mortal heretics they'd brought with them dropped like flies as they charged, downhill, into prepared positions.

She was almost upon the first barrier. It was a ramp of dirt leading up to an elevated trench, and behind the wall she spotted a row of terrified faces cast crimson in the unsteady light of lasgun fire. She'd been like them, before she learned the horrible truth. After all these months, she still wore the ragged remnants of Guard flak armor, and she was still using the same sword she'd taken from Commissar Vant.

"Stand your ground!" shouted a PDF lieutenant, garbed in grey-green armour like the rest of them, as he blasted away uselessly with a laspistol. One beam went right past Mrita's left shoulder and below her wing. "We may die today, but we will die stand—"

His head exploded before he could finish. Bolter shell. Moments later, Mrita charged up the ramp and leapt into the trench, chainsword roaring. Her squad, only five strong now, poured in behind her, along with several lumbering heretic Astartes, and the battle entered its next phase: glorious melee.

She plunged her weapon through the chest of one PDF soldier. He gurgled blood and collapsed, his dying spasms causing him to shoot off several las-bolts that hit his closely packed comrades. Another young man swung a rifle towards her, but she cut off the barrel before he could fire, and she knew that was enough to disable a lasgun. Without the final focusing lense it was just about useless.

The man stared at her, his eyes widening as he saw her folded wings.

"Daemon," he breathed. Mrita moved to cut him down, but another heretic beat her to the kill, hitting him in the chest and shoulder with a blast of lasbolts. He was lucky—in his short life he'd never had to face an actual daemon. There were things much, much worse than Mrita in this galaxy.

She continued the slaughter. The PDF troops were panicking, more of them trying to run away than were staying in the trench, and they were easy kills.

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" roared a towering Chaos Space Marine, slicing happily through a row of poor bastards nearby. His armor was crimson, with a white sigil of Khorne on the left pauldron, and skulls were affixed on spikes behind his head. He had no bolter, just a roaring chainaxe he swung madly with both hands. With titanic sweeps of his weapon he cleaved limbs from torsos and heads from shoulders.

"Blood for the Blood God!" Mrita shouted, echoing him. Her voice was practically a whisper next to the Astartes' war cry, but she did her best.

There was suddenly a searing pain in her back; someone had stabbed her with a bayonet, the blade piercing through a wing and a gap in what was left of her armor plate. She grunted and turned to face her attacker. The bayonet was serrated, so it tugged on the way out, and it hurt terribly.

The person who'd attacked her was from her squad. Jonar, his name was. Whether Jonar had struck her by accident, or had acted according to some conspiracy against her, or had simply sought to make a spontaneous sacrifice to the Blood God, she couldn't say, but she gave him no time for explanation. With one hand she punched him, more weakly than she'd intended due to her injury. He backed away, but readied the bayonet again, and thrust the rifle towards her face.

This time she saw the strike coming, and could react appropriately. She diverted the rifle with a sweep of her arm—the tip of the bayonet just scraped against her cheek—and then, with the other arm, she swung her chainsword horizontally across his unarmored stomach, opening his guts to the world. Intestines spilled out and got caught up in the whirring blade, and gore flew.

Now, there was some blood for the Blood God.

"Bastard," she muttered, as Jonar collapsed screaming. She still reeled from the pain in her back. It was hard to move her right arm, and she felt blood trickling beneath her armor.

Nobody seemed to care that she'd executed one of her own troops, though he was still bleeding out on the ground. Certainly she and Jonar were beneath the notice of the Astartes, and the cultists had largely moved on to the next trench, where there were still skulls to be taken.

"Gods have mercy!" Jonar screamed, just as she started to walk away.

Pitiable. Perhaps even an ally who'd stabbed her in the back did not deserve such a fate. She turned back and chopped his head off, speeding his progress to wherever in the horrid Warp his soul was destined to go.

Back to the battle. The outer perimeter of the PDF garrison, a trenchline, was breached, but there still remained the fortress itself—it rose two or three stories above the ground, in all its Gothic hideousness, with a scattering of heavy weapons turrets blazing away. Shells from a heavy bolter exploded against a Space Marine, blasting visible holes in his armor; the Astartes collapsed limp to the ground. That was the first time Mrita had seen a Son of Slaughter fall this battle, and it might end up being the last. They were hard to take down.

She looked back at the Thunderhawks, three of which had taken off, flown in a circle, and were coming around again to release bolter shells and missiles. Their deadly payloads streaked through the rain and exploded on the side of the fortress, shattering rockcrete; some of the warheads, incendiaries, spread tongues of fire through windows and cooked the soldiers inside. She could hear the screams all the way from the trench line.

The fourth Thunderhawk lay burning on the grass, holed by a lucky rocket shot. It might have flown for ten thousand years, ever since the start of the Long War, in that mythical antiquity when demigods still walked the stars—Mrita felt strangely honored to see it wrecked atop the hill.

The trench was about clear of enemies, now. Servants of the Corpse-Emperor had been converted into corpses themselves. It was also clear of most of her allies; they had advanced to the second trench line and the fortress beyond, charging madly forward wherever there was blood to be had.

Mrita had a mind to count the surviving members of her squad, and resume commanding them—she was a sergeant, now, wasn't that what a sergeant did?—but she only spotted two, fifty meters apart and mixed among other heretics. With this Chaos warband there was no such thing as unit cohesion.

She gave up and marched along after the Astartes, while the wounds on her wing and back continued to bleed.

* * *

There was no telling how long Mrita and Berson wandered the wastes, on the way to Norton's Spire. Days and nights passed at uneven intervals. Sometimes the sun lurched to a halt and reversed course across the purple sky.

They hid, where they could. When titanic, nameless things came lumbering over the horizon, the first order of business was to find the nearest building and stay put until the footfalls receded. When packs of smaller daemons came by, on the hunt for mortals, Mrita and Berson would hide beneath a bridge, or take cover in a wrecked truck, or, in one instance, bury themselves beneath a pile of still-rotting skeletons. Encounters with other roving humans, solitary or in groups, became rarer and rarer. Many of them seemed to be headed in the same direction. Perhaps they were also driven by rumors of a muster, of Astartes looking for mortal troops; the Sons of Slaughter were gathering the remnants of this world, calling them to war among the stars, and even their dark promise was preferable to the horrors that waited here.

That was assuming that there was a muster. Quite possibly this whole journey was for nothing, and they would die anonymous deaths somewhere in the Warp-tainted wilderness.

It did not turn out that way, praise the Gods. Some indeterminate time after they'd set out, after days of hunger and of sights no mortal should ever see, Berson made a surprise announcement: they were upon Norton's Spire.

Mrita did not know who Norton was, nor was there any recognizable spire left—only a crater remained, vast, encircled by the burnt-out shells of buildings and filled with rubble. Something had scooped an entire city out of the ground. In the distance, amid the wreckage at the bottom, Mrita saw hundreds of ragged and filthy people bivouacked in tents around landing craft—and among them, standing out like mountains, were Astartes. There were only a handful of them. Their armor was crimson, spiked, with white sigils of Khorne on the pauldrons, and they stood guard at the center of the camp, holding wickedly sculpted bolters.

How long had they been waiting here, gathering recruits? Perhaps not very long at all. This was a Daemon World, and time flowed differently in different places.

They started on the treacherous path down into the crater. To their right leaned the scorched remains of a nobleman's residence, to their left was a steep slope littered with rubble and skeletons. Above, the purple sky writhed like a bed of worms.

"There is one thing I will need your help with," Berson spoke up.

"What's that?"

"The Sons of Slaughter are a Khornate warband. They're descended from the World Eaters."

"Good for me." Unless the Sons of Slaughter killed her for the sport of it, but it was better to take that risk than to stay any longer on this daemon world. "Why do you bring it up?"

"Because I'm a psyker, and if they knew they'd probably kill me on sight. Khorne and his followers hate psykers."

"Ah." She stopped, turned, revved up her chainsword and pointed it at his chest. "So I should kill you right now, to please my god?"

Berson remained remarkably unperturbed. "Come on. You know you keep me around because I'm useful."

Mrita smiled, and lowered the chainsword. "And because you can make my head explode with your mind. If I really wanted to kill you, I'd stab you in the back without warning."

"Guess I'll have to watch my back. Anyway—"

"You want me to pretend you're just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill heretic, with no psychic powers whatsoever."

Mrita crushed a skull underfoot. The crunch echoed in the desolate vastness around her, and fragments tumbled down the slope.

"Yes, pretty much that."

"Sure. But you're going to have to keep up the charade. You know how to fight without sorcery?"

"Passably." He removed a rusty bayonet from his travelling pouch, and went through a few terribly amateur motions with it.

"Yeah. We'll see."

They marched on. Some distance down the path, around where it finally started to level out, a tracked personnel carrier sat parked against the fallen fragments of a wall. Mrita had never seen one quite like it before. Forests of spikes adorned the top, sides, and angled front—if anyone so much as bumped into it, they'd be skewered—and, like the armor of the Space Marines down below, it was marked with white Khornate runes. Halfway out of the hatch a Space Marine stood watch, holding a pintle-mounted combi-bolter.

"Halt!" boomed a voice, stentorian even at this distance. The Marine by the combi-bolter swiveled his weapon towards them, though with his helmet on she couldn't tell if he was the one speaking, or if there were concealed loudspeakers somewhere.

Berson raised his hands. Mrita just tightened her grip on her chainsword and held it threateningly. She wasn't about to cower, not even before Astartes.

"We heard there was a muster!" she shouted. "We come to fight, for the glory of the Blood God!"

"Step closer."

She and Berson approached. The vehicle's engine idled, growling angrily, and a ramp swung down at the back. One solitary Astartes walked out with thunderous footfalls. He was like the others: three heads taller than her, crimson-armoured, adorned with human and animal skulls. In one hand he held a chainaxe, in the other a plasma pistol.

He stepped within a few paces of Mrita. He looked down upon her and Berson for a few seconds, entirely without speaking, and she stood her ground, even though one of his pauldrons alone probably weighed as much as she did.

The Space Marine growled. It was a deep, guttural sound, amplified through his vox grill, and only then did Mrita flinch.

"You," he said. "I have seen you before."  
She took a step back. That had to mean…

Her mind returned to that desperate battle outside the manufactory, when she had gone toe-to-toe with an Astartes and won—with the help of a heavy weapons team, and a commissar's bolt pistol, and her valiant friend, Enthilde.

"You were there," she said.

The Astartes nodded. "I was there when you, a pitiful guardsman, slew Gharrax the Butcher." Without warning he shoved her to the ground, though she still maintained her grip on her chainsword. Rocks and pieces of rebar pressed into her folded wings.

The Space Marine then tossed aside his plasma pistol, and took the axe in both hands. It roared, he swung it down, Mrita barely rolled out of the way when it smashed into the ground and sent small stones flying. Next time she might not be so lucky.

"Wait!" she said, getting to her feet and raising her sword. "Just wait!"

Another swing. It passed within centimeters of her face. She tried to parry, but there was no matching the Astartes' strength. Berson had by now retreated to cover behind a pile of large rockcrete fragments, further up the slope—conspicuously not helping her—and as for her chainsword, it would do precious little against Legion plate. Maybe she could scratch the paint.

"YOU KILLED MY FRIEND, YOU MISERABLE CORPSE-WORSHIPER!"

He misremembered. Commissar Vant had fired the killing shot, Mrita had only helped. But something told her the Space Marine wouldn't appreciate a correction.

"I worship the Blood God, dammit!" She ran up the hill, and the Space Marine followed with surprising speed, chainaxe swinging. "I'm with Chaos!"

"I'LL RIP YOU APART!"

He was almost upon her. She sprinted onto a rocky outcrop—easily a two-meter vertical drop—spread her wings, and jumped.

She'd tried to fly on the journey here. But her wings weren't developed enough yet, and besides, she had a hole in them that was still in the process of healing. Gliding might still have been in the cards, though.

Suddenly it was too late to wonder—she was off the edge, her whole weight rested on a cushion of air beneath her wings. She glided forward without hitting the ground. Flapping her wings helped, but she still lost altitude. The Space Marine receded into the distance and the Sons of Slaughter's camp approached up ahead.

She wondered what would happen when she landed. She was going awfully fast, now...

Then it was too late to wonder about that, either; Mrita hit the ground just outside the outermost ring of tents, tumbled forward, crashed into the hard and unforgiving—but fortunately not spiked—armor of a heretic.

"Just what do you think you're doing, freak?" the man said.

Mrita pointed chainsword, and that shut him up. The people around her were quiet for a moment, staring at her, then went cautiously back to their business. She took a moment to gather her breath. Nothing hurt, beyond some serious bruising, so nothing was broken. Behind her, on the slope, the Space Marine roared, still charging after her like a Bloodletter of Khorne.

"Azkor wants to kill you, mortal," growled another Son of Slaughter, standing above her. She looked up. His left pauldron was fashioned in the shape of a brass skull, his right pauldron was encrusted in a layer of real skulls. The bolter he held was fashioned into the shape of a screaming skull. "How have you offended him?"

Was a reason really needed, with these people? "He recognized me. I… I killed Gharrax the Butcher, apparently."

The Space Marine lifted his bolter, and she shuddered.

"You are the one who killed Gharrax?"

She stood up, dusted herself off, and wiped the blood from a scratch on her face. "Yes."

"You will address me as 'lord,' mortal."

"Yes, lord."

"Your deed surprised us. Gharrax was a fine warrior, a true champion of Khorne, and that he should be felled by a mere mortal in close combat is… troubling."

"I got lucky."

Azkor was still running, and screaming. He was ten meters from the encampment. Mrita prepared to run—maybe, just maybe, she could lose him in the maze of tents.

"Azkor!" shouted the other Space Marine. "Stand down!"

"She killed Gharrax!"

"I know damn well what she did! Now obey my orders or I'll shoot you!" He turned his bolter on Azkor, and the other marine skidded to a halt, chainsword still whirring.

"I will slaughter the weakling!" growled Azkor, though he made no further moves forward.

"Maybe later. Not now." The Astartes turned from Azkor to Mrita. "I am Khorgegg Gorefist of the Sons of Slaughter. I was killing servants of the hated Imperium ten millennia before you were born. I have done battle across a hundred planets, and countless thousands have fallen beneath the sweep of my blade. When I come to raid a world I bring a maelstrom of gore, of blood, of hatred, such that the galaxy never forgets the name of Khorne." He pointed the bolter straight at her. "Who are you?"

Mrita spread her wings. "My name is Mrita Konvalos. I was a soldier in the Imperial Guard, until I betrayed my unit and slaughtered my comrades. I have sold my soul to the Blood God in exchange for my life."

Khorgegg nodded at her wings, and lowered the bolter. "It seems Khorne has already favored you with a gift. What do you make of this, Azkor?"

"Just another mutation. We've seen plenty of mutants on this Warp-touched world."

"Perhaps. But maybe not. You're in, Mrita Konvalos, traitor of the Guard—you will fight alongside the other mortals, and you will have the privilege of dying in battle. We depart this world in two days." How he measured days, she didn't know. He shoved her further into the encampment. "There's no going back. Try to escape, like a coward, and we'll have your hide stretched across the top of a Land Raider."

"Very well. I am no coward, lord." She looked at the rubble-strewn slope behind Azkor. Up there, the personnel carrier's gunner had left the vehicle, and held Berson at gunpoint.

Khorghegg noticed, too. "That man was with you?"

The psyker's fate was in her hands. She smiled; she could cut him loose now, and be rid of that arrogant weakling forever. On the other hand, he was knowledgeable about the ways of Chaos, and she remembered the battle at Khoz Thul, when he'd blasted ten people into chunks of gore—was that not a power she wanted on her side?

But who was to guarantee that he would remain on her side? Better to make the first betrayal.

"He's dead weight," she said. "A filthy sorcerer I allied with, out of necessity. You may kill him."

"Hm." Khorghegg turned to face the gunner. "Azar! Open fire!"

Berson shot a glance at her. He started to manifest a power, crackling tendrils of psychic fire spreading from his hands, but a bolter shell blasted his head off, and his body collapsed unceremoniously to the ground.


	12. The Lost and the Damned

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to _Gifts of the Blood God_. Before we begin, I have a couple authorial announcements to make:

1\. I've started a second story! This will be a full-length _Star Wars/Warhammer 40,000_ crossover fic, pitting the Imperium of Man and the Galactic Empire against each other. Check it out on my profile!

2\. I'm also planning to begin another, shorter piece, no longer than 10,000 words or so, and I have several ideas listed below. Vote in the reviews for whichever sounds most interesting!

A. Abyssal Crusade: This was when thirty Space Marine chapters ventured on a doomed expedition into the Eye of Terror, at the behest of a corrupted ecclesiarch. Several emerged again, this time as Chaos warbands. What horrors did they face there?

B. Unification Wars: Another little-explored but fascinating event in the Warhammer timeline. I want to write from the perspective of a techno-barbarian warlord, facing the very first Space Marines.

C. Age of Apostasy: A political thriller about Goge Vandire's purges.

D. Rogue Trader: A Rogue Trader braves the treacherous Haunted Cluster of the Antian Sector.

E. Tau: An Imperial governor, only seeking the best for his people, weighs defecting to the Tau-but the xenos may not be as friendly as they seem.

Any other ideas? Let me know!

Now that all that's out of the way, on to the story:

"Your wings," said the cultist, a ragged man named Mizarin, crouching across the fire from Mrita. "How did you get them?"

Overhead, the night sky glowed faintly purple, and around them the encampment buzzed with merriment—they were drinking, roughhousing, in some cases staging gladiatorial deathmatches. Their Astartes masters had said they would leave this planet tomorrow, and the mortal hordes had taken that news well. Anywhere was better than here.

Mrita thought for a short while before answering Mizarin's question.

"I killed my whole unit, and Khorne gave me these as a reward for the bloodshed."

The other heretic nodded. He was about Mrita's age, maybe twenty-five, and by his side he had laid a crude, serrated glaive—it was little better than a knife taped to a pole, yet dried blood thoroughly encrusted it, showing that he'd at least had some success. Nobody at this encampment had made it here without violence. "A worthy sacrifice, for his gruesome eminence. How many did you kill?"

"Thirty, plus the commissar, whom I fought in single combat." She raised the chainsword, pressed the activation rune to send it whirring. "I took this off her battered, bloody corpse. When I was done, I felt the power of the Warp upon me, and suddenly I had wings sprouting from my back."  
Mizarin smiled. Mrita was, of course, lying. She had not earned her wings in a moment of triumph. They'd come to her when she was alone, and afraid, and horrified by what she'd become.

But it would do no good admitting weakness to her new allies. She had to make a myth for herself—a story modest enough to be convincing, yet brutal enough to ward off challengers.

Feral drums beat, not far away. Between two tents she could see an improvised fighting ring, in which two men clobbered each other with spiked clubs, and such was the ferocity of their violence that blood sprayed with each blow, dousing the spectators. At this rate neither of them would remain standing for long, but there would doubtless be more blood-crazed volunteers to replace them.

"How about you?" Mrita asked. "How did you come to tread the Eightfold Path of Khorne?"  
He tapped the Khornate rune, cast in brass, which he had hanging around his neck. "A wise warrior gave this to me, back when I served in the PDF. He said that if I abandoned the Emperor and turned to this new god I would have mastery over the battlefield."

"So you switched sides, just like that?"

The fire crackled. It was a pile of rubbish burning within an empty prometheum tank, and it stank terribly.

"Well, this was around the time of the uprising. The planet had fallen to madness and carnage, and the Emperor clearly wasn't protecting anybody, so only a few sticks in the mud continued with the old faith. Besides, Azryl was calling us to accept the true gods. Have you ever heard that man speak?"

"I have. Then I was nearly slaughtered by daemons."

Mizarin shrugged and smiled. "Chaos is not without its risks. You were lucky to be there at the world-rending, when great Azryl gathered the hosts and sundered the veil—I would have liked to see that."

"You didn't miss out, trust me."

Mizarin did not reply. Mrita allowed a short pause, then spoke up again. "These people around us. Are they all devotees of the Blood God?"

"Many but not all. We have quite a few adherents to Chaos Undivided, and some devotees of Nurgle. No sorcerers, though, and no Slaaneshi cultists." He made a face. "Filthy deviants."

That was another of Khorne's grudges, Mrita was finding out: the followers of Slaanesh were worse than the Imperials. She could see why her patron despised them. They had no notion of honour, of self-sacrifice, and their entire existence was rooted in excess, driven by whatever action fired off the most pleasure receptors in their twisted hedonistic brains.

Another heretic approached the damp, rubbish-strewn patch of ground where Mrita and her new comrade were sitting. She looked about as rough and ragged as any Chaos follower, with her brown hair in knots and scar tissue dominating half her face, and she too wore the tattered remnants of Guard flak armor. An iron Chaos star was fused into her forehead; on her back were a lasgun and a machete.

"Mizarin," she said. "There you are. Who's your bat-winged friend?"

"Another devotee of Khorne. Says she killed her entire unit in cold blood, when she turned."

The woman raised an eyebrow—the one she still had—and nodded. "Guard or PDF?"

"Guard," Mrita said. "Eighth Pireans."

"Nineteenth Pireans, myself. I believe we were deployed to opposite ends of the planet, but still we ended up here." She held out her hand. "My name's Teirra."

"Mrita." They shook hands, and Teirra sat down beside the garbage fire, close to Mizarin.

"I caught a rumor that we were going to Ulstilar," Teirra said. "There, they said, we shall slay the priests and cast down the idols of the heathen Emperor."

"The shrine world, Ulstilar?" said Mizarin. He smiled, and raised his makeshift glaive. "A worthy target! Let us pray to the gods that we can make it there."

Bolter shots rang out, from the direction of the gladiatorial deathmatch. Mrita immediately rose and revved up her chainsword—was there an execution? An attack? It wasn't just a few heretics messing around with a gun, as had happened a few times this evening; that was an Astartes weapon that had opened fire.

"Well?" she asked. Neither Mizarin nor Teirra seemed particularly fazed. "What was that?"

"They're culling the weak," Teirra said. "You can go see for yourself—but don't get too close."

She headed away from the fire and towards the source of the shots. After she walked around one tent, she saw the whole grisly scene: an Astartes stood there, by the edge of the fighting ring, and he had just blasted off the heads of several combatants. Their bodies lay broken and bleeding, not from the bolter. They'd been the losers of their fights, or maybe the winners, sustaining injuries severe enough to cripple them. The Sons of Slaughter would take no cripples with them.

"All right, you miserable lot!" shouted the Space Marine. A horn jutted from the side of his warped helmet, and sheets of chainmail hung down the front of his armor. He lowered his bolter; he was done killing, for now. "There will be no more deathmatches. There are eight hundred of you, and one hundred of our strongest have died while we were in this camp. That cannot continue. You will have your chances to die soon enough, and you will do so in a way that benefits the Sons of Slaughter."

There was a chorus of "Yes, lord." Nobody wanted to draw the ire of this titan of battle.

After the Space Marine started for the personnel carrier he'd presumably come out of, heretics started dragging away headless bodies. This was a routine among them, it seemed. Corpses made for available food. Feeding yourself was easier when you had no moral scruples. Mrita gagged, and turned away.

* * *

The ride up to orbit was violent and squalid, as all things tended to be these days. Heretics fought each other over prime spots, and by the time they were all packed in—easily eighty people were crammed into a windowless, lightless, seatless Thunderhawk hold that could reasonably contain fifty—the compartment reeked of sweat, made fouler still by the presence of a few Nurglite cultists. When she finally stepped out of the shuttle into the hangar of the heretic Astartes warship Gorestorm, it was a blessed change of scenery.

Now she could finally leave that daemon-world behind her, and await… whatever came next.

* * *

A town on Letas IV burning. It was a small town on a minor planet, utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but that was little comfort to its inhabitants, who were being chased through the streets and cut down like animals. Heretic Astartes and mortal cultists alike cried out their justification: "Blood for the Blood God!"

Blood ran through streetside gutters, spattered stained-glass windows, and dripped from the killers' armor, and somewhere, in the swirling depths of the Warp, Khorne reveled in the violence.

Mrita ran down a wide thoroughfare in the center of town, on her own despite her status as a squad leader. If she tracked down her subordinates and reminded them that they were supposed to be a unit, they wouldn't care, and at this point she didn't really care, either—it was really every woman for herself.

Her wing and back still hurt, where one of her "allies" had stabbed her with a bayonet. Jonar had been taught his lesson; Mrita was still limping along, pain spearing through her ribcage every time she moved.

A lasbolt flashed past her. Up ahead was a makeshift barricade, formed from a truck turned on its side and laid across the street, and there were PDF troopers—some of the last remaining around these parts—sheltered behind it. Fortunately Mrita wasn't the only heretic they were shooting at; near her was a rabble of human cultists, along with one Space Marine who fired off bolter shells as if he would never run out. Every so often, heads exploded behind the barricade, as rounds found their mark.

She made for the front of the overturned truck. The barricade was imperfect, and there remained a gap between it and the wall of what had been a hab block. A few lasgun barrels poked out of the gap, naturally, but that was nothing she couldn't handle—she tossed a grenade in, waited against the underside of the truck while it went off. Body parts and dust flew out from the blast site. Then, chainsword in hand, she bolted around the corner, stabbing through the chest the last survivor, who came at her with a bayonet. The PDF soldier screamed and collapsed to the ground.

Except, she wasn't a PDF soldier. The person who'd attacked Mrita was a civilian wearing trousers and a jacket, who had probably just happened to pick up a lasgun. She was frightfully young, too, no older than twelve. It was possible that the Sons of Slaughter had already killed most of her family, and she was the last one standing, seeking revenge against the Chaos raiders for a childhood cut brutally short.

Mrita stopped herself. She was showing pity. Why pity this girl, when there were so many who would have wished to take her place? Hers was a quick death, an honorable death—far better to be her than to be a victim of Nurgle's cruel plagues, or to be lobotomized and made a servitor, or to suffer any of countless other evil fates in the galaxy.

It was a vast and cruel universe. One bat-winged heretic, struggling to survive, was not the worst thing in it.

She continued down the street. To her left, a gang of cultists had stolen flamers and set the lower floors of a building on fire, drowning the people inside—there were many people inside, it had been an attempt at a refuge—under a tide of promethium. The screams were haunting, even after they'd stopped.

On the right side of the street the gothic arches of some Ecclesiarchy building rose six or seven storeys into the air. Stained-glass windows showed the shining Emperor and His nine loyal sons, resplendent in the armor of gods, casting the souls of the unworthy into a sea of fire; she remembered such depictions well, from the cathedral back home on Pirea. But they were all lies—the Emperor was a rotting carcass, the Primarchs were gone, and the edifice of His Imperium would crumble in a matter of centuries, never to return.

Out of spite alone, she picked up a dead PDF trooper's helmet and threw it through the nearest window.


End file.
